Do you know I get such a passion for reading sometimes its like the other passion -writing- only the wrong side of the carpet.
The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility.
The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful – and yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against.
New books lure us to read them partly in the hope that they will reflect this re-arrangement of our attitude – these scenes, thoughts, and apparently fortuitous groupings of incongruous things which impinge upon us with so keen a sense of novelty – and, as literature does, give it back into our keeping, whole and comprehended.
She felt somehow very like him – the young man who had killed himself.
How strange to feel the line that is spun from us lengthening its fine filament across the misty spaces of the intervening world.
At any rate, where books are concerned, it is notoriously difficult to fix labels of merit in such a way that they do not come off.
And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed, one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.
She had never seen the sense of cutting people up, as Clarissa Dalloway did – cutting them up and sticking them together again; not at any rate when one was sixty-two.
Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer!
To know the truth – to accept without bitterness.
Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss.
She lives in dreams, alone.
With equal complacence she saw his misery, condoned his meanness, and acquiesced in his torture.
With the twelfth stroke of midnight, the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the city. All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The eighteenth century was over; the nineteenth century had begun.
No, delightful as the pastime of measuring be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver.
She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.
Then he looked at a car. It was odd how soon one got used to cars without horses, he thought. They used to look ridiculous.
Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her fore-runners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.