and even a tea party means apprehension, breakage

Thinking is my fighting.

I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.

Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.

There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in.

To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.