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.
— Virginia Woolf
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.
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?
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
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?
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.
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.
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
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.
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.
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 older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
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.
As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
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.
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
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.
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.
