When two people have been married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other's bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, a...
What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.
What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I thin...
They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-w...
That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity t...
That is my face,' said Rhoda, 'in the looking-glass behind Susan's shoulder - that is my face. But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces; Susan...
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
Oh, I am in love with life!
Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having.
Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waves swayed this way an...
Must, must, must — detestable word. Once more, I who had thought myself immune, who had said, Now I am rid of all that, find that the wave has tumbled me over, head over heels, scattering my possessio...
Love ought to stop on both sides, don’t you think, simultaneously?’ He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake the sleepers. ‘But it won’t - that’s the devil,’ he added in the same un...
Lord, how unutterably disgusting life is! What dirty tricks it plays us, one moment free; the next, this. Here we are among the breadcrumbs and the stained napkins again. That knife is already congeal...
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an i...
It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.
Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.
I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.
I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.