This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.

On or about December 1910 human nature changed.

Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

A note: despair at the badness of the book; can’t think how I ever could write such stuff—and with such excitement: that’s yesterday: today I think it good again. A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down—and Lord know the truth.