Listening to her, one experienced a deep uneasiness as of having avoided an urgent responsibility, like someone who, walking at night along the banks….

Everything is always a story, but the loveliest ones are those that get written and are not torn up and are taken to a friend as payment for listenin….

All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land..

But it is imperative, for our own survival, that we avoiid one another, and what more successful means of avoidance are there than words? Language wi….

They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet..

It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we….

Divisions of the kind were fashionable at that time, and it was so easy to stifle one's need to help by deciding that help could neither be accepted ….

The strain of constant adaptation to so many fearful events and discoveries is already too much to bear with sanity; one has to keep pretending to sl….

when I first began this diary I said I would give a record of my inner life. I begin to wonder if I have said anything about my inner life. What if I….

When our thoughts revolve we are so often deceived into supposing that their violent movement is an indication of their vigorous originality, the uph….

I inhabited a territory of loneliness which resembles the place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who do return, li….

Language, at least, may give up the secrets of life and death, leading us through the maze to the original Word as monster or angel, to the mournful ….

Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought..

I don't wish to inhabit the human world under false pretences..

Death is a dramatic accomplishment of absence; language may be almost as effective..

I had a cousin once who lived in your dictionary, inside the binding, and there was a tiny hole which he used for a door, and it led out between tric….

[...] a morass of despair violence death with a thin layer of glass spread upon the surface where Love, a tiny crab with pincers and rainbow shell, w….

People dread silence because it is transparent; like clear water, which reveals every obstacle—the used, the dead, the drowned, silence reveals the c….

Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance..

She grew more and more silent about what really mattered. She curled inside herself like one of those black chimney brushes, the little shellfish you….

The idea was to have a basin inverted on his head and his hair cut to the shape of it. Skill and money were not needed. Then the idea grew that it wa….