You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight.
Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any.
Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.
How remorseless life is!
To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.
Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about.
To know whom to write for is to know how to write.
Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.
To love makes one solitary.
It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes – one of the tragedies of married life.
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.
If it were now to die, ’twere now to be most happy.
Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.
And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power, as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.
It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.
One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy.
At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever.
Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in the room and through the waves came the voices of birds singing.