it is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams
It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.
To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.
If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy.
But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them.
There was a serenity about him always that had the look of innocence, when, technically, the word was no longer applicable.
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.
One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.
Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?
Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it.
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.
It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.
. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.
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.
I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.
The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.
But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences.
The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
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