Quote collection
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"One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy."
"The large shiny black forehead of the first whale was no more than two yards from us when it sank beneath the surface of the water, then we saw the huge blue-black bulk glide quietly under the raft right beneath our feet. It lay there for some time, dark and motionless, and we held our breath as we looked down on the gigantic curved back of a mammal a good deal longer than the raft."
"Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes."
"I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you."
"Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange."
"To know whom to write for is to know how to write."
"The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it."
"There are no teachers, saints, prophets, good people, but the artists."
"Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any."
"There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in."
"I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall."
"... the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depend."
"Travelers are much at the mercy of phrases ... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains."
"It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?... What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare."
"But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality has no such simple effect upon the mind of man."
"Theories then are dangerous things."
"I was lying in bed this morning and saying to myself, 'the remarkable thing about Ethel is her stupendous self-satisfaction' when in came your letter to confirm this profound psychological observation. How delighted I was!"
"How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?"
"What a labour writing is ... making one sentence do the work of a page; that's what I call hard work."
"women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. ... Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own."