“I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.”

“Clarice scrawled, 'A question from when I was a little girl that I can answer only now: are rocks made, or are they born? Answer: rocks are.”

“A little girl's fantasies are one thing, and literature is another; just as numbers require rules to give them human meaning, words, too, demand a form to turn them into literature.”

“Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not have talent; one can be called and not know how to go.”

“There is no right to punish. There is only the power to punish,' she wrote. 'A man is punished for his crime because the State is stronger than he; the great crime of War is not punished because beyond the individual there is mankind, and beyond mankind there is nothing at all.”

“I imagined an impulsive Robert taking Henrietta's hands and proclaiming, "I love your sister dearly. Madly. We are betrothed.”

“I reached for the notebook which was always close by. All thoughts of composing epic poems of Greek heroes had left me. The words that often burst from my onto the paper in recent days would be considered mere nothings to the world, but they were everything to me . . . They were the pourings of my heart FOR my heart . . .”