...the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.

literature is the record of our discontent.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.