Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.
There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.
There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.
I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms.
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.
One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.
The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.
I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball
I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement.
I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.
To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?
The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.
Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any.
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
After all, what is a lovely phrase? One that has mopped up as much Truth as it can hold.
To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action.
A million candles burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one
And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.
I see through most people; I'm hardly ever wrong. I see at once what they've got in them.
People only become writers if they can't find the one book they've always wanted to read.
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.
I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
Peace was the third emotion. Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life.
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One's Mind about Another Person.
How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?
A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.
Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.
When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
To be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.
Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.
Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?
I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.
It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.
The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.
Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.
You can't think how I depend on you, and when you're not there the colour goes out of my life.
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man.
I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd.