Quote collection
817 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"No one would think of bringing a dog into church. For though a dog is all very well on a gravel path, and shows no disrespect to flowers, the way he wanders down an aisle, looking, lifting a paw, and approaching a pillar with a purpose that makes the blood run cold with horror ... a dog destroys the service completely."
"Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand."
"Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?"
"Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it."
"Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened."
"Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught."
"The mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions."
"Fear no more, says the heart."
"There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination."
"I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure."
"it is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams"
"I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another."
"Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence"
"I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words."
"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."
"On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points."
"If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women."
"Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?"
"Why have I so little control? It is the case of much waste and pain in my life."
"The proper stuff of fiction' does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss."