A man and his tools make a man and his trade.
Autumn in felted slipper shuffles on, Muted yet fiery. – Vita Sackville-West.
What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.
She wondered which wounds went deeper: the jagged wounds of reality, or the profound invisible bruises of the imagination?
I don’t know what to say to you expect that it tore my heart out of my body saying goodbye to you.
Like a little warm coal in my heart burns your saying that you miss me. I miss you oh so much. How much, you’ll never believe or know. At every moment of the day. It is painful but also rather pleasant, if you know what I mean. I mean, that it is good to have so keen and persistent a feeling about somebody. It is a sign of vitality.
I think we have got something indestructible between us, haven’t we?
We could never have hit it off for long. There was never anything but love to keep us together.
All emotion now was a twilight thing.
Since one cannot have truth,’ cried Sebastian, struggling into his evening shirt, ’let us at least have good manners.
All love is a weakness, if it comes to that, in so far as it destroys some part of our independence.
Lovers, or potential lovers, ought never to meet before the afternoon.
Cristina, being something of a gardener, knew well enough that certain plants may appear to remain stationary for years while they are really making roots underground, only to break into surprising vigour overhead at a given moment.
There had been no moments when she could differentiate and say: Then, at such a moment, I love him; and again, Then, at such another, I loved him not. The stress had been constant. her love for him had been a straight black line drawn right through her life. It had hurt her, it had damaged her, it had diminished her, but she had been unable to curve away from it.
She loves in a way that will make her suffer horribly.
Lady Roehampton was not a young woman; but she was still, though not without taking a certain amount of trouble, beautiful. This question of the middle-aged woman’s beauty and desirability has never sufficiently been exploited by novelists.
Virginia wasn’t all cool intellect by any means. She had the warmest and deepest and most human of affections for those she loved. They were few, perhaps, and she applied alarmingly high standards, but her love and humanity were real, once they were given.
I wouldn’t commit murder for the sake of an allegory.
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment.
The only time I thought of Virginia as being eclipsed was when the sun himself shared her darkening and I saw her standing wraithlike on a Yorkshire moor while the shadow swept onwards towards totality.