“I am rooted, but I flow.”
— Virginia Woolf
“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”
“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”
“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”
“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”
“I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.”
“A light here required a shadow there.”
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
“Thinking is my fighting.”
“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
“I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.”
“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
“Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.”
“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”
“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
“It’s my choice, to choose how to live my life.”
“Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.”
“Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.”
“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
“My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.”
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
“Language is wine upon the lips.”
“The way to write well is to live intensely.”
“I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.”
“As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”
“To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.”
“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”
“Without self awareness we are as babies in the cradles.”
“Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One’s Mind about Another Person.”
“I’m terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.”
“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?”
“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.”
“Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.”
“I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.”
“The streets of London have their map, but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?”
“Fear no more, says the heart...”
“Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.”
“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”
“People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know.”
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
“The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.”
“Consolation for those moments when you can’t tell whether you’re the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.”
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