“The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.”

When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?

A light here required a shadow there.

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

I am rooted, but I flow.

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.

Love, the poet said, is woman’s whole existence.

I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.

Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

I like to have space to spread my mind out in.

She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.

The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you’ve struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.