writer, aircraft pilot, diarist, poet, glider pilot
🔗 Read on Wikipedia1906 – 2001
I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.
For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
Don't wish me happiness - I don't expect to be happy it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor - I will need them all.
Don't wish me happiness - I don't expect to be happy it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor - I will need them all.
How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity.
Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.
Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity.
Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.
Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
Don't wish me happiness - I don't expect to be happy it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor - I will need them all.
it takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeded.
Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It's like an amputation, I feel a limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done... life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid and fuller than before.
The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.
There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas.
I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable.
One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay "in kind" somewhere else in life.
Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.
The wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it.
Lost time was like a run in a stocking. It always got worse.
Dearly beloved — late again!
When the wedding march sounds the resolute approach, the clock no longer ticks, it tolls the hour…. The figures in the aisle are no longer individuals, they symbolize the human race.
Him that I love, I wish to be Even from me.
I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable. All these and other factors combined, if the circumstances are right, can teach and can lead to rebirth.
I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
So dazzling was the spread of constellations that it had the impact of a vision, of some hidden insight. I drove home saying to myself: The dead, too, are like this, blazing within us —\xa0invisibly.
The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.
Here sits the UnicornCaptive at last
Here sits the UnicornYet free.
He could leap the corral,If he chose.
Here sits the Unicorn;Still bleed
Dream wounds, dream tiesOf his wounds, of his snare.
Here sits the Unicorn;In captivity.
Yet look again — O luminous horn!
Here sits the Unicorn — In repose.
Forgotten the strife;Has replaced desire
Quiet, the Unicorn,Free.
I … understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has primarily to do with distractions …\xa0Women's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life or saintly life.
I find I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a rest that will be! The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.
When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.
Rollers on the beach, wind in the pines, the slow flapping of herons across sand dunes, drown out the hectic rhythms of city and suburb, time tables and schedules. One falls under their spell, relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact, like the element on which one lies, flattened by the sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today’s tides of all yesterday’s scribblings.
The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.
The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach — waiting for a gift from the sea.
I have learned by some experience, by many examples, and by the writings of countless others before me, also occupied in the search, that certain environments, certain modes of life, certain rules of conduct are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others. There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them.
I mean to lead a simple life, to choose a simple shell I can carry easily — like a hermit crab. But I do not. I find that my frame of life does not foster simplicity. My husband and five children must make their way in the world. The life I have chosen as a wife and mother entrains a whole caravan of complications.
By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
We must relearn to be alone.
One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.
I kept looking at the flowers in a vase near me: lavender sweet peas, fragile winged and yet so still, so perfectly poised, apart, and complete. They are self-sufficient, a world in themselves, a whole — perfect. Is that then, perfection? Is what those sweet peas had what I have, occasionally in moments like that? But flowers always have it — poise, completion, fulfillment, perfection; I only occasionally, like that moment. For that moment I and the sweet peas had an understanding.
I saw standing against the great stone pillar — on more red plush — a tall, slim boy in evening dress — so much slimmer, so much taller, so much more poised than I expected. A very refined face, not at all like those grinning 'Lindy' pictures — a firm mouth, clear, straight blue eyes, fair hair, and nice color. Then I went down the line very confused and overwhelmed by it all. He did not smile — just bowed and shook hands.
We were high above fields, and there far, far below, was a small shadow as of a great bird tearing along the neatly marked off fields. It gave me the most tremendous shock to realize for the first time the terrific speed we were going at and that that shadow meant us — us, like a mirror! That "bird" — it was us.
The feeling of exultant joy that there is anyone like that in the world. I shall never see him again, and he did not notice me, or would ever, but there is such a person alive, there is such a life, and I am here on this earth, in this age, to know it!
Don't wish me happiness — I don't expect to be happy; it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor — I will need them all.
People don't want to be understood — I mean not completely. It's too destructive. Then they haven't anything left.
I wonder why I bother to tell the truth when people ask me what I think of this and that and how I feel about this and that. I get so complicated and introspective that people often don't understand and are frankly puzzled and (naturally enough) bored. So why bother! It would be so much easier to say what they expected you to, and everything would be easy and pleasant.
I want to write — I want to write — I want to write and never never never will. I know it and I am so unhappy and it seems as though nothing else mattered. Whatever I'm doing, it's always there, an ultimate longing there saying, "Write this — write that — write —" and I can't. Lack ability, time, strength, and duration of vision. I wish someone would tell me brutally, "You can never write anything. Take up home gardening!"
It doesn't matter that it can't last, that we don't find it more often. To know that there is such perfection, that there has been such perfection — it is worth living for. It exists. It has been — it is. One can contemplate it and feel complete peace.
Life itself is always pulling you away from the understanding of life.
Marriage is tough, because it is woven of all these various elements, the weak and the strong. "In love-ness" is fragile for it is woven only with the gossamer threads of beauty. It seems to me absurd to talk about "happy" and "unhappy" marriages.
I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light. … Those fields of daisies we landed on, and dusty fields and desert stretches. Memories of many skies and earths beneath us — many days, many nights of stars.
Charles is life itself — pure life, force, like sunlight — and it is for this that I married him and this that holds me to him — caring always, caring desperately what happens to him and whatever he happens to be involved in.
Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.
He was naming the groups that were pro-war. No one minds his naming the British or the Administration. But to name "Jew" is un-American — even if it is done without hate or even criticism. Why?
Life is a gift, given in trust - like a child.