March 16, 2008

What a relief

“Harriet… ran into her room and flung herself on the bed. She lay quietly for a minute, looking reverently at her notebook and then opened it. She had had an unreasonable fear that it would be empty, but there was her handwriting, reassuring if not beautiful. She grabbed up the pen and felt the mercy of her thoughts coming quickly, zooming through her head onto the paper. What a relief, she thought to herself; for a moment I thought I had dried up. She wrote a lot about what she felt, relishing the joy of her fingers gliding across the page, the sheer relief of communication. After a whole she sat back and began to really think hard. Then she wrote again…” –Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy