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

“I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.”

“I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.”

“Heaven has mercifully decreed that the secrets of all hearts are hidden so that we are lured on for ever to suspect something, perhaps, that does not exist.”

“Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?”

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”

“I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?”