I had the felling, when the thoughts first clarified on paper, that my experience was very different from other people’s. (Are we all under this illusion?) -3.
My shell is not like this, I think. How untidy it has become! Blurred with moss,knobby with barnacles, its shape is hardly recognizable any more. Surely, it had a shape once. It has a shape still in my mind. What is the shape of my life? -16
For to be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mother-core, like spokes from the hub of a wheel. The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. -22
I feel we are all islands – in a common sea. -35
Women,who used to complain of loneliness, need never be alone anymore. -35
Now,instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we choke the space with continuous music, chatter and companionship to which we do not even listen. It is simply there to fill the vacuum.-36
When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others. -38
Only when one is connected to one’s own core is one connected to others. -38
Is this when what happens to woman? She wants perpetually to spill herself away.All her instinct as a woman – the eternal nourisher of children, of men, of society – demands that she give. Her time, her energy, her creativeness drain out into these channels if there is any chance, any leak. -39
We do not see the results of our giving as concretely as man does in his work. -40
The more one gives, the more one has to give. -41
This is an end toward which we could strive – to be the still axis within the revolving wheel of relationships, obligations and activities. -44
The desire to be accepted, the desire to be seen as an individual, not as a collection of functions, the desire to give oneself completely and purposefully pursues us always and has its part in pushing us into more and more distractions, illusory love affairs or the haven of hospitals and doctors’offices. -48
Revolutionary,in fact, because almost every trend and pressure, every voice from the outside is against this new way of inward living. -50
Unless I keep the island-quality intact somewhere within me, I will have little to give my husband, my children, my friends or the world at large. -52
We wish “the one-and-only” to be permanent, ever-present and continuous. The desire for continuity of being-loved-alone seems to me “the error bred in the bone” of man. For “there is no one-and-only”, as a friend of mine once said in a similar discussion, “there are just one-and-only moments.” The only-and-only moments are justified. The return to them, even if temporarily, is valid.-64-65
The desire for pure relationships excludes growth.
But we are no longer children; life is not a beach. There is no pattern here for permanent return, only for refreshment. -66
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown/let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one. -67
Validity need have no relation to time, to duration, to continuity. And what is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place. -68.
But there is still the afternoon opening up, which one can spend not in the feverish pace of the morning but in having time at last for those intellectual,cultural and spiritual activities that were pushed aside in the heat of the race. -78
We push the clock back and try to prolong the morning, overreaching and overstraining ourselves in the unnatural effort. -78
I believe there is, after the oyster bed, an opportunity for the best relationship of all: not a limited, mutually exclusive one, like the sunrise shell; and not a functional, dependent one, as in the oyster bed; but the meeting of the two whole fully developed people as persons. -85
In the past, she has swung between these two opposite poles of dependence and competition, of Victorianism and Feminism. Both extremes throw her off balance;neither is the center, the true center of being a whole woman. -88
The two separate parts contribute to one another. The two separate worlds or the two solitudes will surely have more to give each other than when each was a meager half. “A complete sharing between two people is an impossibility,”writes Rilke, “and whenever it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is an arrowing, a mutual agreement which robs either one member of both of his fullest freedom and development. But, once the realization is accepted that,even between the closest human beings, infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!” -90
For we are, actually, pioneers trying to find a new path through the maze of tradition, convention and dogma. -90
The light shed by any good relationship illuminates all relationships. And one perfect day can give clues for a more perfect life – the mythical life, maybe,of the argonauta. -91
One must accept the security of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.-101
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. -102
The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but the prize. In fact, the acquisitive instinct is incompatible with true appreciation of beauty. -106
But thrown on this island of living, we stretch to understand each other and are invigorated by the stretching. The difficulty with big city environment is that if we select – and we must in order to live and breathe and work in such crowded conditions – we tend to select people live ourselves, a very monotonous diet. -110-111
Values weighed in quantity, not quality; in speed, not stillness; in noise, not in silence; in words, not in thoughts; in acquisitiveness, not beauty. How shall I resist the onslaught? -111
We are asked today to feel compassionately for everyone in the world; to digest intellectually all the information spread out in public print; and to implement in action every ethical impulse aroused by our hearts and minds. The interrelatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our hearts can hold. Or rather – for I believe the heart is infinite – modern communication loads us with more problems than the human frame can carry. -116
Because we cannot solve our own problems right here at home, we talk about problems out there in the world. an escape process goes on from the intolerable burden we have placed upon ourselves. -117
The good past is so far away and the near past is so horrible and the future is so perilous, that the present has a chance to expand into a golden eternity of here and now. -118
Perhaps the greatest progress, humanly speaking, is these past twenty years, for both women and men, is in the growth of consciousness. -128
Anew consciousness of the dignity and rights of an individual, regardless of race, creed, class or sex. A new consciousness a questioning of the materialistic values of the Western world. a new consciousness of our place in the universe, and a new awareness of the inter-relatedness of all life on our planet. -128