The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain.

Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant...

It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

The only journey is the one within.

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.

And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. ...live in the question.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.

The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.

In the country of the story the writer is king.

Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.

Oh Constance, we are so happy.

No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense.

God! Whose hand was I holding?

I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance.' 'I doubt if I could cook one,' said Constance.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.