Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.
I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.
The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you’ve struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.
Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.
But the close withdrew: the hand softened. It was over – the moment.
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
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.
There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.
There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.
You send a boy to school in order to make friends – the right sort.
These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
Speech is an old torn net, through which the fish escape as one casts it over them.
All artists need a room of their own.
The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.
Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.
War is not women’s history.
To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.
Sir, I would trust you with my heart. Moreover, we have left our bodies in the banqueting hall. Those on the turf are the shadows of our souls.
Yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.