A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

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.

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

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

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.

The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

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

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Death is a dark flower, its perfume heady and dangerous as it pulls you into its bosom.

After you have done a great thing for a great glory, sit and think and understand the journey thereon, for a little mistake can erase a great glory!

The noblest search is the search for excellence.

My prayer today is that God would make me an extraordinary Christian.

Fundamentally I think we all write the kinds of work we'd most like to read. Or we try to.

This question is posed to mayself, am I a man who thinks he's an angel? Or an angel who thinks he's a man?

When you walk through that door of opportunity you don't slam it shut behind you.

I think if you see that no one is going to laugh at you for it, I think the concept of living nicely will be infectious. I believe there is room for the absence of cynicism.

...the artist treats intuition and nuance with respect and reminds us that a little madness resides in all of us. Artists give voice to feelings, to conflict, to the prism of human experience.

Love has the quality of informing almost everything - even one's work.