Did you ever, in that wonderland wilderness of adolesence [sic] ever, quite unexpectedly, see something, a dusk sky, a wild bird, a landscape, so exquisite terror touched you at the bone? And you are afraid, terribly afraid the smallest movement, a leaf, say, turning in the wind, will shatter all? That is, I think, the way love is, or should be: one lives in beautiful terror.

My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.

Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.

It’s better to look at the sky than live there

June, July, all through the warm months she hibernated like a winter animal who did not know spring had come and gone.

I'm not a character in any of my books.

There is nobody in the world that you can't get if you really concentrate on it, if you really want them. You've got to want it to the exclusion of everything else.