She Would Not Exchange Her Solitude For

I Could Not Live By Literature If Only To Begin With, Because Of The Slow Maturing Of My Work And Its Special Character.

Lighting Does Occasionally Strike And Occasional The Result Isn't A Corpse.

Not To Have An Audience Is A Kind Of Death.

And When Is There Time To Remember, To Sift, To Weigh, To Estimate, To Total?

Literary History And The Present Are Dark With Silences . . . I Have Had Special Need To Learn All I Could Of This Over The Years, Myself So Nearly Remaining Mute And Having To Let Writing Die Over And Over Again In Me. These Are Not Natural Silences--what Keats Called Agonie Ennuyeuse (the Tedious Agony)--that Necessary Time For Renewal, Lying Fallow, Gestation, In The Natural Cycle Of Creation. The Silences I Speak Of Here Are Unnatural: The Unnatural Thwarting Of What Struggles To Come Into Being, But Cannot.