“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
“To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.”
“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.”
“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”
“When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness – I am nothing.”
“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.”
“Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure”
“The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published.”
“Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.”
“Nothing has really happened until it has been described.”
“I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.”
“I am rooted but I flow.”
“The only advice … that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.”
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
“It may be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”
“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time.”
“There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.”
“Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.”
“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”
“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”
“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”
“I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.”
“All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.”
“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”
fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to have—positively—a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang—there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us pretty often.”
“Never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having.”
“He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”
“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.”
“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”
“Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.”
“I will not be ‘famous’, ‘great’. I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.”
“The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.”
“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”
“They can because they think they can.”
“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
