The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.
Night had come – night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day.
I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.
Long ago I realized that no other person would be to me what you are.
She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.
Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.
Now, aged 50, I’m just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.
I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me.
And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.
Wat a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.
Oh, I am in love with life!
It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.
Tragedies come in the hungry hours.
But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.
I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.
Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading – I like reading books in the bulk.
If the best of one’s feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?
At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.
I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.