“The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.”
“To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.”
“We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.”
“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
“When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.”
“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”
“I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write.”
“Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.”
“The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.”
“One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.”
“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.”
“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 has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats --and one always secretes too much jelly.”
“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”
“Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.”
“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.”
“These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.”
“A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.”
“Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.”
“Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.”
“Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.”
“Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?”
“For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?”
“If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure -- the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?”
“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery --always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?”
“Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face -- as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought.”
“There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.”