cherry > cherry's Quotes

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
― Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

“Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
― Virginia Woolf

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
― Virginia Woolf

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
― Virginia Woolf

“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.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”
― Virginia Woolf

“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.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928

“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.”
― Virginia Woolf

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

“Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you.”
― Virginia Woolf, Selected Diaries

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
― Joan Didion

“You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.”
― Joan Didion

“Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
― Joan Didion

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”
― Joan Didion

“Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“Nature is woman's best friend,' she [Yasmina] often said. 'If you're having troubles, you just swim in the water, stretch out in a field, or look up at the stars. That's how a woman cures her fears'.”
― Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

“Godhood is just like girlhood: a begging to be believed”
― Kristin Chang