I have had my vision.
It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on an...
Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known euphemistically as the stately homes of England.
I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction.
The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
This I say is the present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are attached.
There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.
The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if they had never been...
The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful.
So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing
One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in it.
My belief is that if we live another century or so — I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals — and have five hundred a...
Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life?
It is Clarissa, he said.For there she was.
I, who am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement, make this mark, waiting for some winter's evening.
I need someone whose mind falls like a chopper on a block; to whom the pitch of absurdity is sublime, and a shoestring adorable. To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?
Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
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.