"In the country of pain we are each alone."
"Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands."
"One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being."
"Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self."
"One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being."
"In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place."
"Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family."
"Women's work is always toward wholeness."
"I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become ... But there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress."
"I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree's way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind."
"Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness."
"Solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people ... precludes awareness of one's self so that after a while the self no longer knows that it exists."
"We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be."
"Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be. The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become."
"In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place."
"The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the "creative" is the desire to kill."
"There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most."
"People who cannot feel punish those who do."
"Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets - they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away."
"Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old! The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind."
"To be desperate is to discover strength. We die of comfort and by conflict live."
"We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be."
"Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?"
"Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at 15 to write several novels."
"Though friendship is not quick to burn, It is explosive stuff."