How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

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Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

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Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.

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Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

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I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.

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The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

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A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

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The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

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I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.

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It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

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