“What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice!”

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“Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone.”

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“I keep forgetting how precious those moments are—when art puts a glaze over life and arrests it and you can stop and look at it and sink into it without being pulled off the edge of the picture by the strings that lead to daily life. How can you ever see life unless you see it that way?”

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“I don’t think I like writing letters in type. It is slow, and then it seems so terribly public. I am shocked at what I put down, as though it had appeared in the newspapers. Also, it looks too permanent, too definite and irrefutable. It embarrasses me, too, like talking over the long-distance telephone.”

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“I must slough off people—too many connections, too many people, too many entanglements. But it will take all the time just saying no. I don’t help them, they don’t help me. It’s just bitter useless waste of lives, time, soul—everything.”

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“Will I ever get home? It is like looking down a tremendous ski jump. The bottom is not so far away in time, but in effort and all one has to give to it, such a mighty jump.”

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“You can’t just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else’s appreciation.”

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“I am doing it right over again. I am sick of clothes and gewgaws and bags and advertisements and newspaper clippings and society pages and the new Vogue and fittings and the main floors of department stores and the radio—jazz and magazines and hairdressers. I am sick sick to death of them. But I clutch at them madly, like smoking or drinking—anything to keep from thinking.”

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“It isn’t the sorrow of last winter that stabs, it is those moments of hope—remembering those moments of hope is unbearable.
        I planned to have him sleep in my bed the first night he came back.
        It is not hard looking back at sorrow but at happiness.”

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“Death: We will all have it. In a century this distance between him and me will be nothing.”

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“Death to you is not death, not obituary notices and quiet and mourning, sermons and elegies and prayers, coffins and graves and wordy platitudes. It is not the most common experience in life—the only certainty. It is not the oldest thing we know. It is not what happened to Caesar and Dante and Milton and Mary Queen of Scots, to the soldiers in all the wars, to the sick in the plagues, to public men yesterday. It never happened before—what happened today to you. It has only happened to your little boy…”

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“One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding; how little one can get along with, not how much. Physical shedding to begin with, which then mysteriously spreads into other fields. Clothes, first. Of course, one needs less in the sun. But one needs less anyway, one finds suddenly. One does not need a closet-full, only a small suitcase-full. And what a relief it is! Less taking up and down of hems, less mending, and—best of all—less worry about what to wear. One finds one is shedding not only clothes—but vanity.”

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