Efesos, Turkey - 2006
1. “Ah, but when the post knocks and the letter comes, always the miracle seems repeated—speech attempted. Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost. Life would split asunder without them.”
2. "Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders."
3. “As an experience, madness is terrific . . . and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.”
4. “As a woman, I have no country. As a woman my country is the world.”
5. "A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back."
6. "Arrange Whatever pieces come your way."
7. "But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors."
8. ”So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters, and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.”
9. “A tearing wind last night. A flurry of red clouds, hard, a water colour mass of purple and black, soft as a water ice, then hard slices of intense green stone, blue stone and a ripple of crimson light.”
10. "Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above."
11. ”Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.”
12. "Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works."
13. "Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."
14. "For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together"
15. "Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do."
16. "Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue."~
17. "I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens."
18. “If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure -- the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?”
19. ”If we didn't live adventurously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.”
20. “If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.”
21. ”If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion -- the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes.”
22. "It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer."
23. “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.”
24. “It is harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”
25. "It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."
26. “It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.”
27. “It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.”
28. ”I want the concentration and the romance, and the words all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.”
29. "I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write."
30. "Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end."
31. ”Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
32. “Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
33. "Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth."
34. “My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery -- always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?”
35. "Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand."
36. “Nothing has really happened until it´s been described.”
37. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
38. "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."
39. “One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.”
40. “On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.”
41. “Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.”
42. "Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life."
43. "Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated."
44. "Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?"
45. “That great Cathedral space which was childhood.”
46. ”The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
47. ”The common reader...differs from the critic and the scholar… He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole-a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.”
48. “The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.”
49. "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."
50. "The older one grows, the more one likes indecency."
51. "There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea."
52. "These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism."
53. "The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping."
54. “Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inabilityto cross the street.”
55. "Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up
56. "This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say."
57. “To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.”
58. "We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to someone opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on"
59. “We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.”
60. "What is meant by ''reality''? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying"
61. "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 touches 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."
62. "When a subject is highly controversial… one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker."
63. “When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet… indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
64. “When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke around me I am in darkness - I am nothing. I only come into existence when the plumber, or the horse dealers, or whoever it may be, says something which sets me alight. Then how lovely the smoke of my phrase is, rising and falling, flaunting and falling, upon red lobsters and yellow fruit, wreathing them into one beauty.”
65. "When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly."
66. "Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradles. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself."
67. "Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"
68. “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses, possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
69. "Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."
