Quote collection
817 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through."
"A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life"
"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."
"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."
"Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once."
"A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living."
"I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life."
"I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything."
"The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions."
"No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself."
"Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size."
"How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself."
"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."
"If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?"
"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."
"The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages."
"Language is wine upon the lips."
"There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves."
"I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded."
"As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."