“I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.”

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.

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

A boy and a girl, dressed in the T-shirts and denim that are the shabby uniform of this age.

You ought not to practice childish ways, since you are no longer that age.

All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.

Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are.

Dissents speak to a future age.

We live in an age when it is cheaper to buy the rights to movies than to make them.

Age is a hell of a price to pay for wisdom.

When I turned 60, it didn’t bother me at all.