The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere.
Don't wish me happiness I don't expect to be happy all the time... It's gotton beyond that somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor. I will need them all.
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.
It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeded.
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.
Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.
Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.
Only love can be divided endlessly and still not diminish.
I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.
Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.
The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires.
I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.
It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for that long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.
One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach.
One can never pay in gratitude: one can only pay 'in kind' somewhere else in life.
I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being concious of living.
The beach is not a place to work; to read, write or to think.
Woman must come of age by herself... She must find her true center alone.
My Life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds.
Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day- like writing a poem or saying a prayer.
One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can only collect a few. One moon shell is more impressive than three. There is only one moon in the sky.
No man is an island,' said John Donne. I feel we are all islands -- in a common sea.
When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.
If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.
By and large,mothers and house wives are the only workers who do not have regular time off.They are the great vacationless class
What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice!
Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone, his own burden, his own way.
Yesterday's fairy tale is today's fact. The magician is only one step ahead of his audience.
Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distraction...What matters is that one be for a time inwardly attentive.
Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.
You can’t just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else’s appreciation.
I want to be pure in heart -- but I like to wear my purple dress.
Everything today has been heavy and brown. Bring me a Unicorn to ride about the town.
The web of marriage is made by propinquity, in the day to day living side by side, looking outward in the same direction. It is woven in space and in time of the substance of life itself.
Great problems that face the world today in both the private and the public sphere cannot be solved by women – or by men – alone. They can only be surmounted by men and women side by side.
Can one make the future a substitute for the present? And what guarantee have we that the future will be any better if we neglect the present?
There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them.
I feel a hunger now- a real hunger-for letting the pool still itself & seeing the reflections.
Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude.
 but in looking outward together in the same direction. ){kind=small}
Love does not consist in gazing at each other (one perfect sunrise gazing at another!) but in looking outward together in the same direction.
After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.
It isn't for the moment you are stuck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity, faith and security.
When the heart is flooded with love there is no room in it for fear, for doubt, for hesitation.
Every step, even a tentative one, counts.
A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.
When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment.
It is only in solitude that I ever find my own core.
Woman must come of age by herself. This is the essence of "coming of age" -to learn how to stand alone.
All living relationships are in process of change, of expansion, and must perpetually be building themselves new forms. But there is no single fixed form to express such a changing relationship.
It's as if you've been walking against a great wind all your life, and then the wind is gone, and you can't walk.
Eternally, woman spills herself away in driblets to the thirsty, seldom being allowed the time, the quiet, the peace, to let the pitcher fill up to the brim.
The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but the prize.
But the bond—the bond of romantic love is something else. It has so little to do with propinquity or habit or space or time or life itself. It leaps across all of them, like a rainbow—or a glance.
It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.
There comes a moment when the things one has written, even a traveler's memories, stand up and demand a justification. They require an explanation. They query, 'Who am I? What is my name? Why am I here?
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee.
There are certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them.
The acquisitive instinct is incompatible with true appreciation of beauty
One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach—waiting for a gift from the sea.
Not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity that the wise men warn us of. It leads not to unification but to fragmentation. It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul.
I walked far down the beach, soothed by the rhythm of the waves, the sun on my bare back and legs, the wind and mist from the spray on my hair.
No man is an island,” said John Donne. I feel we are all islands—in a common sea.
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I had the feeling, when the thoughts first clarified on paper, that my experience was very different from other people’s. (Are we all under this illusion?)
Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.
