...she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

She tapped on the window with her embossed hairbrush. They were too far off to hear. The drone of the trees was in their ears; the chirp of birds; other incidents of garden life, inaudible, invisible to her in the bedroom, absorbed them. Isolated on a green island, hedged about with snowdrops, laid with a counterpane of puckered silk, the innocent island floated under her window. Only George lagged behind.

I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

Night had come—night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day.

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