Throughout much of history, women writers have capitulated to male standards, and have paid too much heed to what Virginia Woolf c...alls "the angel in the house." She is that little ghost who sits on one's shoulder while one writes and whispers, "Be nice, don't say anything that will embarrass the family, don't say anything your man will disapprove of ..." [ellipsis in original] The "angel in the house" castrates one's creativity because it deprives one of essential honesty, and many women writers have yet to win the freedom to be honest with themselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The private buildings [of Virginia] are very rarely constructed of stone or brick; much the greatest proportion being of scantling... and boards, plastered with lime. It is impossible to devise things more ugly, uncomfortable, and happily more perishable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and correct, an...d Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope. Colley Cibber was a silly little man without much elegance and Shelley was very Percy and very Bysshe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who to...uches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Arnold Bennett says that the horror of marriage lies in its "dailiness." All acuteness of relationship is rubbed away by this. The... truth is more like this: life--say 4 days out of 7Mbecomes automatic; but on the 5th day a bead of sensation (between husband and wife) forms which is all the fuller and more sensitive because of the automatic customary unconscious days on either side. That is to say the year is marked by moments of great intensity. Hardy's "moments of vision." How can a relationship endure for any length of time except under these conditions?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shad...es to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Knew her own mind. But the mind radically commonplace, only its inherited force, & cumulative sense of power, making it remarkable....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face--as if hung on a scaffol...d of heavy private brooding; & thought.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »