❝In my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.❞
— Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading
❝If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.❞
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
❝Be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can.❞
— Thomas Hardy
❝When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.❞
— C.S. Lewis
❝You have a heart; and I love you for being ashamed to show it. You are ashamed of your flood, while others are ashamed of their ebb.❞
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
❝I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a great deal.❞
— Vita Sackville-West, from a letter to Virginia Woolf dated 21 January 1926
❝I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this — But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.❞
— Vita Sackville-West, from a letter to Virginia Woolf dated 21 January 1926
❝I will never dine out again. I will burn my evening dress. I have gone through this door. Nothing exists beyond. I have taken my fence: and now need never whip myself to dine with these “people” again. I sacrificed an evening alone by myself - an evening of pleasure. Instead: forced, dry, sterile, infantile conversation. So the fence is not only leapt, but fallen. Why jump?❞
— Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 16 December 1930.
❝A garden to walk in and immensity to dream in—what more could he ask? A few flowers at his feet and above him the stars.❞
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
❝Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book ! A message to us from the dead, from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away ; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.❞
— Charles Kingsley
❝You are in love!” he exclaimed.
Jacob blushed.
The sharpest of knives never cut so deep.❞
Jacob blushed.
The sharpest of knives never cut so deep.❞
— Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
❝Writing is such a damn lonely sickness.❞
— Robert Frobisher
❝She was an enchantress, inspiring love and beauty. And fairies never quite disappear altogether.❞
— Hubert de Givenchy on Audrey Hepburn
❝I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals.❞
— Anaïs Nin
❝Am I “distant”? I would not say so. I suppose I am cleverly untouched. Most ironically.❞
— Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 20 March 1933.
