If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
Virginia Woolf
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
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?
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
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.
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
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.
The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
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.
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
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.
As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
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.
Language is wine upon the lips.
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 far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
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.
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.
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
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.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
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.
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
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 telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.
I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.
Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.
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.
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.
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.
