“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.

Everything in life is writable.

I woke to the sound of rain.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.

It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.

I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery – air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, This is what it is to be happy.

Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.

See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.

A man’s world is different from a woman’s world and a man’s emotions are different from a woman’s emotions and only marriage can bring the two different sets of emotions together properly.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

The hardest thing, I think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted and spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly-managed past.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.