"She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS."
— Henry James

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
— George Eliot

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."
— George Eliot

"...for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
— George Eliot

"Only the insane take themselves seriously."
— Max Beerbohm

"Punctuality is the virtue of the bored."
— Evelyn Waugh

"Evelyn Waugh: How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William?
Sir William Beveridge: I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it.
Waugh: I get mine spreading alarm and despondency and I get more satisfaction than you do."
— Evelyn Waugh

"The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!"
— Evelyn Waugh

"Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days - such as that day - when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

"There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief...and unspeakable love."
— Washington Irving

"I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away."
— Nancy Mitford

"always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair they loved or they loathed, they lived in a world of superlatives"
— Nancy Mitford (The Pursuit of Love)

"But no one came. Because no one ever does."
— Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure)

"There was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead-born child."
— Thomas Hardy (The Woodlanders)

"That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the center of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it."
— Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure)

"The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted."
— D.H. Lawrence

"All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets,unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing."
— D.H. Lawrence

"Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars."
— Gustave Flaubert

"Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"Dear Jesus, do something."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire)

"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Strong Opinions)

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
— Virginia Woolf

"Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.

(in Athenaeum, December 1923)
"
— Virginia Woolf

"Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure"
— Virginia Woolf

""I prefer men to cauliflowers""
— Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."
— Virginia Woolf

"the battered woman--for she wore a skirt--with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love--love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death's enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over."
— Virginia Woolf

"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)

"God created war so that Americans would learn geography."
— Mark Twain

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel."
— Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary)

"Cabbage: A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head."
— Ambrose Bierce

"If one starts with the anatomical difference, which even a patriarchal Viennese novelist was able to see was destiny, then one begins to understand why men and women don't get on very well within marriage, or indeed in any exclusive sort of long-range sexual relationship. He is designed to make as many babies as possible with as many different women as he can get his hands on, while she is designed to take time off from her busy schedule as astronaut or role model to lay an egg and bring up the result. Male and female are on different sexual tracks, and that cannot be changed by the Book or any book. Since all our natural instincts are carefully perverted from birth, it is no wonder that we tend to be, if not all of us serial killers, killers of our own true nature. "
— Gore Vidal

"Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little."
— Gore Vidal

"No one ever went broke under-estimating the stupidity of the American Public."
— H.L. Mencken

"Is there no way out of the mind?"
— Sylvia Plath

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,
because it serenely disdains to destroy us."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)

"Swells, Marina? we ocean, depths, Marina? we sky!"
— Rainer Maria Rilke (The Best of Rilke: 72 Form-True Verse Translations with Facing Originals, Commentary, and Compact Biography)

"There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe