Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?
If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even better.
He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear, pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.
Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.
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 concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.
Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you.
What does the brain matter compared with the heart?
To love makes one solitary.
I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...
It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.
Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.
By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.