Quote collection
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"She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach."
"When she read just now to James, 'and there were numbers of soldiers with kettledrums and trumpets,' and his eyes darkened, she thought, why should they grow up, and lose all that?"
"Nothing shakes my opinion of a book. Nothing -- nothing. Only perhaps if it's the book of a young person -- or of a friend -- no, even so, I think myself infallible."
"People only become writers if they can't find the one book they've always wanted to read."
"In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June."
"Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost. Life would split asunder without them. 'Come to tea, come to dinner, what's the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the capital is wonderful; the Russian dancers....' These are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe."
"When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred."
"There are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, and if one can neithre feel nor think, where's one?"
"and then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart."
"The immense success of our life is, I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it."
"How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers."
"Tragedies come in the hungry hours."
"We shall be the mouthpieces of the divine spirit—"
"I remember I would not stand still; I would not stop being perplexed by everything that spontaneously attracted me or caught my attention. I would never cease to look around me and observe myself in relation to nature: either crystal clear skies and sun-melting afternoons, or foggy winter days and weirdly tinted nights. I would never cease to dream and stand by the window, ready to let the diversity of life pass freely through my skin; courageous enough to believe I stood a chance in devouring each shade of sensation. Or perhaps, immensely foolish to plainly - believe at all."
"But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying."
"One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see."
"Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next."
"It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house."
"To be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes."
"Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are."