As for my next book, I won’t write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.
This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.
My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
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!
No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes.
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.