Quote collection
817 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. More than anything... it calls for confidence in oneself...And how can we generate this imponderable quality most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself."
"Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame"
"The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpended the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a fingerprint of a shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside."
"So that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again."
"Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes."
"Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death."
"Alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know"
"Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?"
"At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial-and any question about sex is that-one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold."
"Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost."
"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."
"A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back."
"... the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other."
"It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning."
"He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink."
"I will dream today; for I must unscrew my head somehow."
"It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole. This wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together"
"It is equally vain,” she thought, “for you to think you can protect me, or for me to think I can worship you. The light of truth beats upon us without shadow, and the light of truth is damnably unbecoming to us both."
"As for 'drawing you out,' please believe I don't do such things deliberately, with an object -- It's only that I am, as a rule, far more interested in people than they are in me -- But it makes me a nuisance, I know: only an innocent nuisance."
"If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people readingfor the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching."