“I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella.”

“I love to close my eyes a moment and think of the land outside, white under the mingled snow and moonlight--the heaps of stones by the roadside white--snow in the furrows. Mon Dieu! How quiet and how patient!”

“Saw the sun rise. A lovely apricot sky with flames in it and then solemn pink. Heavens, how beautiful...I feel so full of love to-day after having seen the sun rise.”

“Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others ... Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth."(Journal entry, 14 October 1922)”

“I sometimes wonder whether the act of surrender is not one of the greatest of all - the highest. It is one of the [most] difficult of all... You see it's so immensely complicated. It needs real humility and at the same time, an absolute belief in one's own essential freedom. It is an act of faith. At the last moments, like all great acts, it is pure risk. This is true for me as a human being and as a writer. Dear Heaven, how hard it is to let go - to step into the blue. And yet one's creative life depends on it and one desires to do nothing else.”

“The mind I love most must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.”

“It's a terrible thing to be alone - yes it is - it is - but don't lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath - as terrible as you like - but a mask.”

“Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.”

“I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.”

“Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different.”

“I want by understanding myself to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.”