Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn't know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn't see how I could write it.

But the soul concerns me; and I am beginning to wonder whether it is wise or useful to spend so much time searching for one’s own.

I didn’t write. I just wandered about.

The manipulated millions could be aroused or soothed by any lies. The guiding light of journalism was no stronger than a glow-worm.

My kind of loneliness now has no cure, you know; it is something I expect to live with until I die. Friends are heavenly kind, sometimes fun; it would be fatal not to have them. But I by no means need or want daily contact; perhaps it takes as much out of me as it gives, perhaps takes more.

The world’s fat is badly divided.

Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn’t know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn’t see how I could write it.

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

Since I am devoted to my own freedom, I didn’t think it just to deny other people theirs; and a basic freedom must be to be bossed by your own kind, not by foreigners.

I felt both puny and pretentious, trying to write in the grandeur of that natural world where everything was older than time and I was the briefest object in the landscape.