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.
~ Virginia Woolf
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
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.
The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
