 A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out. |
| The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity. |
| It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. |
| Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say. |
| I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. |
| To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves. |
| I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write. |
| It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality. |
| Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them. |
| Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic. |
| The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own. |
| 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. |
| If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. |
| I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it. |
| This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. |
| Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders. |
| It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. |
| It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses. |
| 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. |
| Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe. |
