When your sense of self and happiness comes from within and isn't a roller coaster ride dependent on others or circumstances, you approach life differently. You make better choices. You draw to you the people and situations that matter. The others, they fall away.

Listen, Harriet. I do unterstand. I know you don't want either to give or to take ... You don't want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person.""That's true. That's the truest thing you ever said.""All right. I can respect that. Only you've got to play the game. Don't force an emotional situation and then blame me for it.""But I don't want any situation. I want to be left in peace.

Be like the flower, content with its nature.

If life throws you a few bad notes or vibrations, don't let them interrupt or alter your song.

She had her image_ and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it some day. In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper__nd this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further.

_After all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.