Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.

Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.

I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

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