Jean Stafford

“To her own heart, which was shaped exactly like a valentine, there came a winglike palpitation, a delicate exigency, and all the fragrance of all the flowery springtime love affairs that ever were seemed waiting for them in the whisky bottle. To mingle their pain their handshake had promised them, was to produce a separate entity, like a child that could shift for itself, and they scrambled hastily toward this profound and pastoral experience.”

“A small silence came between us, as precise as a picture hanging on the wall.”

“He does what I have always needed to have done to me, and that is that he dominates me.”

“For all practical purposes I left home when I was 7.”

“You say that you hope I will be recognized as the best novelist of my generation. I want you to know now and know completely that that would mean to me absolutely nothing.”

“I am growing meaner by the hour.”

“From time to time, I need a rest from the exercitation of my intellect.”

“For me, there is nothing worse than the knowledge that my life holds nothing for me but being a writer.”

“Irony, I feel, is a very high form of morality.”