Society gives me chicken and coffee, bed and lodging, in return for a certain number of pieces of paper which were left me by an aunt, for no other reason than that I share her name.
Virtually all the characters in the novel have failed to live up to their early dreams and ambitions.
Here are the dead poets, still musing, still pondering, still questioning the meaning of existence.
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man.
She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.
They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue – write this, think that.
That man, she thought, her anger rising in her, never gave; that man took.
These garden graveyards are the most peaceful of our London sanctuaries and their dead the quietest.
What she liked was simply life.
The truth was that she did not want intimacy; she wanted conversation. Intimacy has a way of breeding silence, and silence she abhorred.
The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together.
I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me.
As summer neared, as the evenings lengthened, there came to the wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the strangest kind – of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind...
She could not imagine Peter or Richard taking the trouble to give a party for no reason whatever.
E pensai a quanto fosse sgradevole esserne chiusi fuori; e pensai a come, forse, debba essere peggio rimanere chiusi dentro.
The words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf.
Perhaps, though, these words from her essay “How Should One Read a Book?” are our best guide: “The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
Mr. Carmichael, who was basking with his yellow cat’s eyes ajar, so that like a cat’s they seemed to reflect the branches moving or the clouds passing, but to give no inkling of any inner thoughts or emotion whatsoever, if he wanted anything.
But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.
There has fallen a splendid tear From the passion-flower at the gate. She is coming, my dove, my dear; She is coming, my life, my fate; The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near’; And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late’; The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear’; And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.