Happy is the day whose history is not written down.

Elizabeth ... had the prerogative of the rich that she could be generous with large sums and niggardly over small ones.

I realize that it is as one ages and loses one's natural force that one is at the mercy of heredity. The young are themselves: the aging, their parents' children.

Total grief is like a minefield. No knowing when one will touch the tripwire.

about ten days ago I got started on a new book, and am completely, brazenly devoted to it: my hair is uncut, my letters are unwritten, the house is a shambles, and I sit here as happy as Mrs. Jellaby, though I am in 1836, not Africa. It won't go on like this, I shall fall over some obstacle, and wake out of my dreams with a black eye and broken shins: but while it does last, I daren't interrupt it. I haven't had such a spell of writing for nearly three years.

I do apologize for writing by hand - and so badly. I shall soon be like Helen Thomas, notoriously illegible. In her last letter only two words stood out plain: 'Blood pressure.' Subsequent research demonstrated that what she had actually written was 'Beloved friends.

Love is the only real patriation, and without one's dear one sits in a dreary and boring exile.