Quotes

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we cant go through another of those terrible times. And I shant recoverthis time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.

[ Final diary entry :] Occupation is essential. Andnow with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.

Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannotshare; to procure benefits which I have notshared and probably will not share; but not togratify my instincts, or to protect myself or my country. For . . . in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As awoman my country is the whole world.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slipquotations down people’s throats—and one always secretes too much jelly.

When, however, one reads of a witch beingducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of awise woman selling herbs, or even of a veryremarkable man who had a mother, then Ithink we are on the track of a lost novelist, asuppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashedher brains out on the moor or mopped andmowed about the highways crazed with thetorture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, Iwould venture to guess that Anon, who wroteso many poems without signing them, wasoften a woman.

Death is the enemy. . . . Against you I willfling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, ODeath!

It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, Ihave had my vision.

I found myself thinking with intense curiosityabout death. Yet if I’m persuaded of anything, it is of mortality—Then why this sense that death is going to be a great excitement?—somethingpositive, active?

[ Of Elizabethan drama :] The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

On or about December 1910 human characterchanged. . . . All human relations haveshifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children.And when human relations change there is atthe same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.

[ Of James Joyce’s Ulysses:] Never did I readsuch tosh. As for the first 2 chapters we willlet them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th—merelythe scratching of pimples on the body of thebootboy at Claridges.

The “Me” Decade and the Third Great Awakening.

One of the phrases that kept running through their conversation was “pushing the outside of the envelope.” The “envelope” was a flight-test term referring to the limits of a particular aircraft’s performance, how tight a turn it could make at such-and-such a speed, and so on. “Pushing the outside,” probing the outer limits, of the envelope seemed to be the great challenge and satisfaction of flight test.

All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well—how very shortsighted! . . . I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintingsand other works exist only to illustrate the text .

Radical Chic . . . is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its tradition—Politics, like Rock, Pop, and Camp, has its uses.

If a man has talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.

Duh poor guy! . . . Maybe he’s found out by now dat he’ll neveh live long enough to know duh whole of Brooklyn. It’d take a guy a lifetime to know Brooklyn t’roo an’ t’roo. An’ even den, yuh wouldn’t know it all.

It is this ability to bear what is unbearable and to go on living, to go on doing what one is used to doing—it is this uncanny ability that the existence of the human species is based on.

“Where they got you stationed now, Luke?” . . . [“]In Norfolk at the Navy base,” Luke answered, “m-m-making the world safe for hypocrisy.”

Slice him where you like, a hellhound is always a hellhound.

“I hate you, I hate you!” cried Madeline, a thing I didn’t know anyone ever said except in the second act of a musical comedy.

To Herbert Westbrook, without whose never-failing advice, help, and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen .

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt .

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist .

Your kneesare a southern breeze—or a gust of snow. Agh! what sort of man was Fragonard?

Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky.

Who shall say I am not

We’re all of us sentenced to solitary

I’m not living with you. We occupy the same cage.

Make voyages!—Attempt them! —there’s nothing else.

Mrs. Stone found herself thinking that surely such beauty was a world of its own whose anarchy had a sort of godly license.

I don’t want realism. I want magic!

STELL-LAHHHHH!

Turn that off! I won’t be looked at in this merciless glare!

They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!

The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.

You have Van Gogh’s ear for music.

The dead don’t stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth . . . and the ambitions they had . . . and the pleasures they had . . . and the things they suffered . . . and the people they loved. They get weaned away from earth—that’s the way I put it—weaned away.

[ Of Marilyn Monroe :] Marilyn was mean. Terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever met around this town. I have never met anybody as mean as Marilyn Monroe nor as utterly fabulous on the screen, and that includes Garbo.

Decidedly one of us will have to go.

I am dying, as I have lived, beyond my means.

Mr. Whistler always spelt art, and we believe still spells it, with a capital “I.”

[ Reply when asked to name the hundredbest books of all time :] I fear that would be impossible, because I have only written five.

To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.

Each time one loves is the only time that one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it.

Don’t tell me that you have exhausted life.