“We must think of ourselves as a fertile land on which to draw. And if we do not, we grow rotten, like an unmilked cow. And if we leave something unexploited it dies within us wasted. But to tax one’s powers always at their maximum potentiality—this is the only way to live at all, in the proper sense of the word.”
“We should listen to our own counsel. All we can depend on—all the wonder and value and beauty and love and faith and genius—pleasure and sorrow, hope, passion, understanding—all these are within us, in our own hearts, and minds. And nowhere else.”
“It’s important to keep the serious side underlying all our course of life: but it is equally important to temper this with the lighter side. Without it we have sterility and a lack of imagination and progress. On the other hand, completely serious people are so ludicrous that I wonder is not this attitude, in the last analysis, the lightest side. And accordingly, the lightest-minded people—who have a good fundamental intelligence—are the most serious, philosophic and thoughtful. It takes observation and judgment and independence to laugh at things which should be laughed at. However, I shall always keep the heavier side in the more influential position, because basically that is how I am.”
“Just now the world of experience seems more attractive than the world of books I have just stepped out of. I have not closed the door. I have merely left one room and gone into another. I have found a new confidence in myself. I have become a person at last.”
“Often I look at the books in the library and think about my freshman days—how I wanted to read each book over those four years. I’ll do it. And I know that, as soon as I have time, ideas and their realization will fall like rain. With regularity, one produces something. I shouldn’t be afraid”
“He’s so wonderfully thoughtful—he makes me feel quite sluggish and careless intellectually. Because his thinking is so rich. It is the most amusing task in the world—the unraveling of an idea—or the pursuit of an answer. He is what I demand most—an inspiration: because my whole preferences in people are based upon—subconsciously and consciously—a furtherance of my terrific ambitions.”
“Passed my first suicide moment this evening. It comes when one stands confronted with work, empty sheets of paper all about, and inside one’s head, shame and confusion, inside a maelstrom that will not subside, fragments that will not hang together. Showing essentially how trite and universal and eternal is every great human emotion. This was a great human emotion. When I wonder now that I have passed it, if I shall ever commit suicide, the question is, shall I ever fail myself and others in an equally important crisis in my life? Life is a matter of self-denial at the right moments. Looking ahead won’t do. We can make out a too rosy future. Successful living is self-denial without asking why.”
“One’s most stubborn addictions, one’s deepest loves, such as smoking, drinking, writing—are first unpleasant, almost unnatural things to do. Proving the death instinct at least “present” in the man on the streets, in the ecstatic results of smoking & drinking; proving the arts are born of strangeness, fascination, pain & slow acquaintanceship. Like writing, like painting, like composing music. Still, now, when the writer says, I hate to write, it is the physical effort of the brain which prompts this. He might hate drinking water when he does not want it, but he will for his health, and the inevitable condition of the body prompts it.”
"the safe space and encouragement to grow into the person she longs to be"
“The painfullest feeling is that of your own feebleness; ever as the English Milton says, to be weak is the true misery. And yet of your strength there is and can be no clear feeling, save by what you have prospered in, by what you have done. Between vague wavering capability and indubitable performance, what a difference!”
“Days without any creative work are lost days. An artist, a real artist, would work”
“Insufficient reading. I must change my habits or remain a dolt as to world literature”
“Mad people are the only active people. They have built the world. Mad people, constructive geniuses, should have only enough normal intelligence to enable them to escape the forces that would normalize them.”
“I have poked so many books into me that I am like an over-stoked oven without a match.”
“I may starve, but I will not work for another man and burn out the oil of my days. ”
“I’m constantly sad and hopeless: I think about my life and work, and the thought occurs that I will never accomplish anything. There’s no remedy. There are no miracles—neither in my head, nor from the mouth of God.”
“For future reference: In case of doldrums of mind or body or both, sterility, depression, inertia, frustration, or the overwhelming sense of time passing and time past, read true detective stories, take suburban train rides, stand a while in Grand Central—do anything that may give a sweeping view of individuals’ lives, the ceaseless activity, the daedal ramifications, the incredible knots of circumstance, the twists and turns in all their lives, which no writer is gifted enough to conceive, sitting in the closeness of his quiet room.”
“The actual time spent in creative work each day need be only very little. The important thing is that all the rest of the day contribute to this strenuous time.
”
“Put all your fears into words, paint pictures of your enemies, prose poems of all apprehensions, doubts, hatreds, uneasinesses, to defeat them and stand upon them.”
“8/30/47
There is a way.”