Activity

AUGUST 26, 1941

[...] I want to do so much. The one moment of discouragement and doubt comes before all one’s things are put away again, when one sees all the old books and thinks that one has read them all and how little one knows anyway, when one sees unfinished manuscripts and thinks of the l…

This summer I have climbed, like a struggling Junebug on a fluted lamppost, to a higher ledge. A kind of higher standard, but above all a new hope and confidence. I intend to stay here. Right here and beyond.

AUGUST 15, 1941

[...] I want to sit down at a typewriter in a room all alone. I want long days to mull over what I’ve seen, silent hours to dream out stories that are as delicate, in the first plot germs, as smoke rings. And long evenings, which will be fewer now, I imagine, with Rosalind. [...]

7/29/41

What I admire most in an individual is a kind of activity—a liveliness either of mind or body or both—which alone can assure the development of the character I prefer. I believe liveliness and animal energy are the sine qua nons.

6/22/41

There are some people we like instantly, before they have even had a chance to flatter us (which is the greatest encouragement to liking a person), because they have that quality of seeing in us what we desire to be, what we are trying to be, and of not seeing that which we are at the mo…