I have had my vision.
If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?
Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.
When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre.
Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall.
I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.
Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.
If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women...
Why must they grow up and lose it all?
My notion’s to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.
It is the duty of the writer to describe.
Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.
There are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, and if one can neithre feel nor think, where’s one?
Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.
I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.
What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.
It is no use trying to sum people up.
All the time she writing the world had continued.
Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.
When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.