Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The history of most women is hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence.
The profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait - whether to fish with worms or not.
You have been in every way all that anyone could be.... If anybody could have saved me it would have been you.
A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.
The mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions.
How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?
There was a day when I liked writing letters -- it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains.
Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.
I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.
Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?
I am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold.
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations.
No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?
It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it.
But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.
Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.
Consolation for those moments when you can't tell whether you're the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.
There are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, and if one can neithre feel nor think, where's one?
Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.
When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
King old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always to to a good man, they say.
Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.
The streets of London have their map, but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?
I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.
They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought.
Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.
A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.
There was a serenity about him always that had the look of innocence, when, technically, the word was no longer applicable.
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.
Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.
Facts must be manipulated; some must be brightened; others shaded; yet, in the process, they must never lose their integrity.
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.
It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.
Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?
By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.
There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in.
Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.