It’s my choice, to choose how to live my life.
They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought.
I have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on longer in these terrible times. I shan’t recover this time. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it but cannot fight any longer.
Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath.
The immense success of our life is, I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it.
You can’t think how I depend on you, and when you’re not there the colour goes out of my life.
The history of most women is hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence.
Without self-awareness, we are as babies in the cradle.
The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of-man.
Most of a modest woman’s life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.
At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial-and any question about sex is that-one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.
It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole. This wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.
Soup is cuisines kindest course.
Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death.
To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action.
One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one’s words.
I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.
As for ‘drawing you out,’ please believe I don’t do such things deliberately, with an object – It’s only that I am, as a rule, far more interested in people than they are in me – But it makes me a nuisance, I know: only an innocent nuisance.
I don’t believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.
As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.