Virginia Woolf
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?
For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you cannot separate them.
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.
Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.
But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? - the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world - a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
At 46 one must be a misre; only have time for essentials.
As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
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.
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.