As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

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.

Feeling good about yourself is not the same thing as doing good. Good policy is more important than good feelings.

But when will our leaders learn - war is not the answer.

In some sense, I'm a romantic. I like the idea of organic history and tradition.

This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

He that shuns trifles must shun the world.

Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.

What a pity people don't take as much trouble with their own breeding as intelligent racehorse owners do. But then I suppose it is bordering on fascism to think like that.

I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.

Though the meek shall inherit the earth, but don't forget: The poor are the ones who inherit the debt.

You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.