"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"
"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction"
"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"
"A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out"
"Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"
"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"
"These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism"
"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"
"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"
"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top"
"You cannot find peace by avoiding life"
"It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality"
"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"
"Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman"
"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 cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share"
"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people"
"If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?"
"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?"
"I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman"
"I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write"
"I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose"
"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in"
"I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it"
