To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
Language is wine upon the lips.
They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.
But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.
But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.
I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.
I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely.
It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.
At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.
Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.