Isn’t life,’ she stammered, ‘isn’t life–‘ But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter. He quite understood.’Isn’t it, darling?’ said Laurie.

The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

I am treating you as my friend, asking you to share my present minuses in the hope that I can ask you to share my future plusses.

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a...

To acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure.

Ah, what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes.

The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone – reading between the lines – has bcome the secret friend of their author.

I saw myself driving through Eternity in a timeless taxi.

I sometimes wonder whether the act of surrender is not one of the greatest of all – the highest. It is one of the [most] difficult of all… You see it’s so immensely complicated. It...

The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody’s fathomed...

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. That is the mystery.

The mind I love most must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody...

…Oh dear, I sometimes think…whatever would I do if anything happened…But thinking’s no good, is it, madam? Thinking won’t help. When I find myself doing that, I say to myself, “come along, Ellen! Stop it...

Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different. Life would undergo a change of appearance because we ourselves had undergone a change of...

It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.

Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others … Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.”(Journal entry, 14 October 1922)

Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can’t build on it; it’s only good for wallowing in.