One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

What does the brain matter compared with the heart?

To love makes one solitary.

Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you.

I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.

When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.

To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of treesand changing leaves.

By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?

Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?

Yes yes yes I do like you. I am afraid to write the stronger word.

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.

My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.

It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.

For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.

When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.

About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?

Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.

We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.

For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.

Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.

Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.

All the time she writing the world had continued.

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.

It is much more important to be oneself than anything else.

I think I won't come on Thursday for this reason; I must get on with writing; you would seduce me completely [...]

But it is a great comfort to think of you when I'm not well – I wonder why. Still nicer – better to see you. So I hope for Tuesday.

First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

unless I am myself, I am nobody.