The way we view the world, the ultimate barometer of quality is: if it gets shared, it’s quality.
Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can't get out of it on your own.
Memory, that library of the soul from which I will draw knowledge and experience for the rest of my life.
Down in the bottom of my childhood my father stands laughing.
[On her mother:] My relationship with her is close, painful, and skaky, and I always have to keep searching for a sign of love. Everything I do, I do to please her, to make her smile, to ward off her fury. This work is extremely exhausting.
I fear the place I have in the memory of others. They remind me of things I myself have forgot.
my childhood grew thin and flat, paperlike. It was tired and threadbare, and in low moments it didn't look like it would last until I was grown up.
To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.
It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him [H. D. Thoreau]. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own.
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.
First, I write down all I know about the story, at length and in detail. Then I sink the iceberg and let some of it float up just a little.