"She felt... how life, from being made..." - Quote by Virginia Woolf

“There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.”

“Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.”

“Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”

“But wait!!! You MAKE it to 60. You didn't think you would!”

“There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.”

“I am 67, but I'm not too old to make a fresh start.”

“No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby - so helpless and so ridiculous.”

“I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.”

“What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.”