Virginia Woolf

“My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.”

“By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream”

“Mr Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.”

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

“Death is woven in with the violets,” said Louis. “Death and again death.”)”

“Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease?”

“The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.”

“It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”

“Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.”

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

“But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second.”

“The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.”

“The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible.”

“To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.”

“For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it.”

“The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?”

“But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets.”

“Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.”

“Theirs, too, is the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.”

“But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with the lady's-maid that high birth is a form of congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in one of those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.”

“We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life and speak the real language.”

“Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”

“But she feared time itself... the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how, little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered, and felt often as she stood hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room, an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a diver before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens beneath him, and the waves which threaten to break, but only gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust as they just turn over the weeds with pearl.”

“The merest schoolgirl [school girl,] when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer [try to] describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”

“Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscription on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay's knee.”

“A light here required a shadow there.”

“She felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through with it.”

“She had done the usual trick – been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr Bankes) were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere.”

“For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.”

“Mrs Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren't things spoilt then, Mrs Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silence by her side) by saying them?”

“But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. 'About life, about death; about Mrs Ramsay' – no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody.”

“She alone spoke the truth; to her alone could he speak it. That was the source of her everlasting attraction for him, perhaps; she was a person to whom one could say what came into one's head.”

“Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

“When a subject is highly controversial — and any question about sex is that — one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.”

“The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

“Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?”

“The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

“Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?”

“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

“Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?”

“Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.”

“For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.”

“He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”

“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.”

“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

“When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.”

“He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.”

“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.”

“While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace.”

“The trumpeters, ranging themselves side by side in order, blow one terrific blast: — He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess — he was a woman.”

“The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman's grace.”

“No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party — for what do they battle except their own prestige?”

“The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property; (2) that she was a woman which amounts to much the same thing …”

“Something, perhaps, we must believe in, and as Orlando, we have said, had no belief in the usual divinities she bestowed her credulity upon great men — yet with a distinction. Admirals, soldiers, statesmen, moved her not at all. But the very thought of a great writer stirred her to such a pitch of belief that she almost believed him to be invisible. Her instinct was a sound one. One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.”

“Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings.”

“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”

“But look — he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gesture one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime.”

“Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion. The trees wave, the clouds pass. The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared. We shall not always give out a sound like a beaten gong as one sensation strikes and then another. Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens.”

“Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then — our friends are not able to finish their stories.”

“Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.”

“Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.”

“I like the copious, shapeless, warm, not so very clever, but extremely easy and rather coarse aspect of things; the talk of men in clubs and public-houses; of miners half naked in drawers — the forthright, perfectly unassuming, and without end in view except dinner, love, money and getting along tolerably; that which is without great hopes, ideals, or anything of that kind; what is unassuming except to make a tolerably, good job of it. I like all that.”

“It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.”

“Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.”

“Directly the mulberry tree begins to make you circle, break off. Pelt the tree with laughter.”

“'That was the burden,' she mused, 'laid on me in the cradle; murmured by waves; breathed by restless elm trees; crooned by singing women; what we must rememeber; what we would forget.'”

“Words rose above the intolerably laden dumb oxen plodding through the mud. Words without meaning - wonderful words.”

“We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.”

“Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.”

“They never pulled the curtains till it was too dark to see, nor shut the windows till it was too cold. Why shut out the day before it was over? The flowers were still bright; the birds chirped. You could see more in the evening often when nothing interrupted, when there was no fish to order, no telephone to answer.”

“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”

“Mrs Swithin took her knitting from the table. 'Did you feel,' she asked, 'what he said: we act different parts but are the same?'”

“The flowers flashed before they faded. She watched them flash.”

“The artist after all is a solitary being.”

“Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.”

“Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour--landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ...”

“Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.”

“I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.”

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

“For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.”

“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”

“The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life … it is only when we can measure the way of life and the experience of life made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer.”

“If, then, one should try to sum up the character of women's fiction at the present moment, one would say that it is courageous; it is sincere; it keeps closely to what women feel. It is not bitter. It does not insist upon its femininity.”

“That great Cathedral space which was childhood.”

“Our patience wore rather thin. Visitors do tend to chafe one, though impeccable as friends. L. and I discussed this. He says that with people in the house his hours of positive pleasure are reduced to one; he has I forget how many hours of negative pleasure; and a respectable margin of the acutely unpleasant. Are we growing old?”

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”

“This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.”

“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.”

“For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.”

“I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.”

“Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”

“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.”

“We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.”

“If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?”

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?”

“The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be, and deserves fuller investigation.”

“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.”

“Language is wine upon the lips.”

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”

“The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

“Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”

“Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”

“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.”

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.”

“The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

“Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”

“The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.”

“Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”

“Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.”

“Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

“The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.”

“It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.”

“We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.”

“The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.”

“There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.”

“When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.”

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

“Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.”

“Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”

“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”

“Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.”

“I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.”

“Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.”

“Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.”

“It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”

“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”

“For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?”

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”

“Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.”

“Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.”

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”

“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”

“Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.”

“Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”

“Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.”

“Fear no more," said Clarissa. Fear no more the heat o' the sun; for the shock of Lady Bruton asking Richard to lunch without her made the moment in which she had stood shiver, as a plant on the river-bed feels the shock of a passing oar and shivers: so she rocked: so she shivered.”

“These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.”

“To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.”

“Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

“For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.”

“It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”

“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.”

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.”

“I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in”

“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”

“Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.”

“Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.”

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

“Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”

“Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.”

“Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.”

“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.”

“When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.”

“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.”

“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

“Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.”

“That great Cathedral space which was childhood.”

“This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.”

“One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.”

“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

“If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?”

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

“The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.”

“If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?”

“It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.”

“This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.”

“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”

“The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.”

“This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.”

“We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.”

“Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

“If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.”

“To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.”

“One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.”

“Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?”

“Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?”

“Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.”

“It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.”

“Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.”

“It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.”

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

“Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.”

“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”

“Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.”

“The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

“By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”

“A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.”

“One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.”

“And that is the time to read poetry . . . when we are almost able to write it.”

“There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.”

“First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”

“Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.”

“You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.”

“Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?”

“I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.”

“I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.”

“Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure”

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

“A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.”

“Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.”

“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”

“And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!”