Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I find that when I've seen a certain number of people my mind becomes like an old match box -- the part one strikes on, I mean.
The root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.
We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.
If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
Safe! safe! safe!' the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry 'Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.
Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame
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.
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.
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth.
Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!
Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.
So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living.
madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!" "I'm dead, sir!" she replied. A few minutes later, they became engaged.
As nobody can possibly tell me whether one's writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one's own pleasure. I am sure of that.
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.
In marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house.
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.
The immense success of our life is, I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it.
A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence.
All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.
It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.
Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?
Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself.
If this were the time or the place to uphold a paradox, I am half inclined to state that Norfolk is one of the most beautiful of counties.
The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.
For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.
They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
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.
Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.
As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.
Night had come—night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day.
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.
Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.
How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?
The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.
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.
to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.
Sir, I would trust you with my heart. Moreover, we have left our bodies in the banqueting hall. Those on the turf are the shadows of our souls.
There is something I want-something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed.
I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.