50 quotes
English modernist writer (1882–1941)
“I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun.”
"When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?"
on Philosophy
"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."
on Writing
"Arrange whatever pieces come your way."
on Life
"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."
on Health
"To love makes one solitary."
on Love
"I reach my object and say, Wander no more. All else is trial and make-believe."
"They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.]"
"He is precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the rest of his life."
"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."
on Perception
"No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself."
"It was awful, he cried, awful, awful!Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day."
on Resilience
"Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?"
"Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others."
"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others."
"No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion."
"The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare."
on Truth
"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."
"It is no use trying to sum people up."
"Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing."
