We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.

Flinging himself from his horse, he made, in his rage, as if he would breast the flood. Standing knee-deep in water he hurled at the faithless woman all the insults that have ever been the...

He is precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the rest of his life.

One must love everything.

The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

Love, the poet said, is woman’s whole existence.

She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of...

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over...

And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a...

Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much...

Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the...

But it would have been a surprise, not only to katherine herself, if some magic watch could have taken count of the moments spent in an entirely different occupation from her ostensible one.Sitting with faded...

This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.

One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.

anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. … Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

Death and again death.”)

She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was...

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. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company...

We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.

For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not – Heaven help us – all having lodgment at one time...

As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the...

So the being grows rings; identity becomes robust. What was fiery and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of life from every quarter...

…children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody....

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are ‘sides,’ and it is...

Oh, to awake from dreaming!

For if it is rash to walk into a lion’s den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on top of St. Paul’s, it is still...

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so...

And somehow or other, the windows being open, and the book held so that it rested upon a background of escallonia hedges and distant blue, instead of being a book it seemed as if what...

so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again…

I often wish I’d got on better with your father,’ he said.But he never liked anyone who–our friends,’ said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to...

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.

What is nobler,” she mused, turning over the photographs, “than to be a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty?

Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door...

The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth’s part in life, and a day moth’s at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in...

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device – a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle,...

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t...

He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and...

As for my next book, I won’t write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

Yet she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreathes heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing...

It’s too short,’ she said, ‘ever so much too short.’ Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths,...

My head is a hive of words that won’t settle.

. . . but it was their relation, and his coming to her like that, openly, so that anyone could see, that discomposed her; for then people said he depended on her, when they must...

When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.

so that it may grow fatter and

So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude...