My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Do not move, do not go. Sink within this moment. Hold it for ever.

I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.

Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.

We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.

I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely.