“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”

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.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.

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

Weep not for me. Rather let your tears flow for the sorrows of the multitude. My work is done. Like a ripe fruit I admit the gathering. Death has no terrors for it is a wise law of nature. I am ready whenever the summons may come.

They whose minds are least sensitive to calamity, and whose hands are most quick to meet it, are the greatest men and the greatest communities.

Joy is the mainspring in the whole Of endless Nature’s calm rotation. Joy moves the dazzling wheels that roll In the great Time-piece of Creation.

Be still, for only in stillness, can the mountains float on the oceans that move through you.

Be still. There are things worth listening for.

Consolation Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.

Love yourself through all storms, calm moments and boredom – know you deserve love.

Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.