Selected Letters

I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.

Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it

And this urge to run away from what I love is a sort of sadism I no longer pretend to understand.

It is much harder to be lonely, when you have for a while stopped being lonely. I was used to having only myself, cold and hard as that is; I could live with it. And now I wait, for a voice, a face, a body, that is not going to be here, is not mine, does not in any case wait as I do, nor share this homesickness. […] How to explain that I taught myself to be tough and indifferent, because it mattered too much and learned not even to weep in my mind not to notice.

I love you. Have a hell of a good time. I don’t really know what else is worth having.

People do not yet realize (because the mind isn't built that way) what war can be. They fear it but surely they fear it the way children fear nightmares, dimly, without definite images in their heads of how it will all work out.