Virginia Woolf
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.
There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.
The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.
The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
The first duty of a lecturer - to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantlepiece forever.
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness.
Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.