I ... understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has primarily to do with distractions ... Women's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life or saintly life.

So dazzling was the spread of constellations that it had the impact of a vision, of some hidden insight. I drove home saying to myself: The dead, too, are like this, blazing within us - invisibly.

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.

I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable. All these and other factors combined, if the circumstances are right, can teach and can lead to rebirth.

Lost time was like a run in a stocking. It always got worse.

The wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it.

Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.

One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay "in kind" somewhere else in life.

There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas.

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.