“At the simplest level, only people who know they do not know everything will be curious enough to find things out.”

“It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.”

“But how are you going to get out, into the world of other people? That is your problem now, if I may hazard a guess — to find the right relationship, now that you know yourself, between the self that you know and the world outside. It is a difficult problem. No living poet has, I think, altogether solved it.”

“That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.”

“Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myselfsometimes, or how to measure and name and count out thegrains that make me what I am.”

“Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.”

“They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and then do what other people do when they have done it.”