The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness.
I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.
Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.
Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.
Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.
Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.
I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.
Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.