Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.
Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.
The rebellion of art is a daily rebellion against the state of living death routinely called real life.
Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.
August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day don't you? 92 degrees even in the shade.
I have a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many.
Know thyself,’ said Socrates. Know thyself,’ said Sappho, ‘and make sure that the Church never finds out.
Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.
The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.
I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.
I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.
The most prosaic of us betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about 'my body' rather than 'I.
Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position.
I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
I'm always nervous about going home, just as I am nervous about rereading books that have meant a lot to me.
This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.
Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places.
I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it.
When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.
Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)
Infatuation.First Love.Lust.My passion can be explained away.But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals
When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.
Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar.
I don't read reviews because by then it's too late - whatever anyone says, the book won't change. It is written.
I want to get to the end and feel that I've done all I could, given the limitations and given the opportunities.
What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us?
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there
Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.
The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.
[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.
I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.
Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.
With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.
Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.
I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.
I never wanted children. If I'd been deeply in love with a man and he'd wanted children, it would have been difficult.
Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?
Of course, people will laugh at you, but people laugh at a great many things so there is no need to take it personally.
The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.
One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life.
the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated.
Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision.
There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.
Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.
The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.
London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.
I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.
This is a quantum universe ... neither random nor determined. It is potential at every second. All you can do is intervene.
That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.