Life would split apart without letters.

Facts must be manipulated; some must be brightened; others shaded; yet, in the process, they must never lose their integrity.

Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences.

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

For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, "This is what I have made of it! This!" And what had she made of it? What, indeed?

I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.