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

I feel domesticity just slipping off me. It is a choice. Either one can let it go or one can intensify it. The people who intensify it seem to get quite a lot of interest out of that, too, and are as preoccupied as pirates.

I seem to use this word 'kind' very frequently. When one is unhappy or anxious it is a quality one dwells on.

no one wants to be praised for possibilities when one has submitted performances.

There is a period in one's life - perhaps not longer than six months - when one lives in two worlds at once ... It is the time when one has freshly learned to read. The Word, till then a denominating aspect of the Thing, has suddenly become detached from it and is perceived as a glittering entity, transparent and unseizable as a jellyfish, yet able to create an independent world that is both more recondite and more instantaneously convincing than the world one knew before.

General de Gaulle is again pictured in our newspapers, looking as usual like an embattled codfish.

One cannot overestimate the power of a good rancorous hatred on the part of the stupid. The stupid have so much more industry and energy to expend on hating. They build it up like coral insects.