nothingeverything.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? 

I would have said, then, it was torture to love someone you couldn't save. But what did I know? How lucky it was - how lucky it always is - to love someone at all.

Now that he was close to having his dream fulfilled, however, he was almost afraid. He could imagine the luxury of a long shower, but the prospect of the hotel room itself, the silence, the softness of things, made him wonder if he would not lie there through the night, sleepless, listening out for every sound.

I like the sense of one lighted room in the house while all the rest of the house, and the world outside, is in darkness. Just one lamp falling on my paper; it gives a concentration, an intimacy. What bad mediums letters are; you will read this in daylight, and everything will look different. I think I feel night as poignantly as you feel the separateness of human beings; one of those convictions which are so personal, so sharp, that they hurt. It seems to me that I only begin to live after the sun has gone down and the stars have come out.

Is it foolish to speak of little joys that occur in the middle of tragedy? It is our humanity. Whatever we have left of it. We must not deny it to ourselves.