Sofia Hossain > Sofia's Quotes

“Everything people do that doesn’t work has to be somebody else’s fault. Next time you know, geezers’ll be suing the government for getting old and kids’ll be taking their mommies to court because they came out ugly.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“That was part of being a girl--you were resigned to whatever feedback you'd get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn't react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they'd backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that - to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this —But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

“I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.”
― Vita Sackville-West

“All emotion now was a twilight thing.”
― Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent

“One must be businesslike, although the glass is falling.”
― Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent

“Henry by the compulsion of love had cheated her of her chosen life, yet he had given her another life, an ample life, a life in touch with the greater world, if that took her fancy; or a life, alternatively, pressed close up against her own nursery. For a life of her own, he had substituted his life with its interests, or the lives of her children with their potentialities. He assumed that she might sink herself in either, if not both, with equal joy. It had never occurred to him that she might prefer simply to be herself.”
― Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent

“This hour of union with the old woman soothed her like music, like chords lightly touched in the evening, with the shadows closing and the moths bruising beyond an open window. She leaned against the old woman’s knee as a support, a prop, drowned, enfolded, in warmth, dimness, and soft harmonious sounds. The hurly-burly receded; the clangour was stilled…”
― Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“And I felt, I think for the first time, a rage against men. Not because they could say, "I'm going," and go. Not because they could go to college and become lawyers or preachers while women could only be drudge or ornament but nothing between. Not because they could be parents at no cost to their bodies. But because when they love a woman they may be with her, and all society will protect their possession of her.”
― Isabel Miller, Patience & Sarah

“Let the world either kill us or grow accustomed to us; here we stand.”
― Isabel Miller

“Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing.”
― Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“For those who like that sort of thing," said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, "That is the sort of thing they like.”
― Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.”
― Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“These years are still the years of my prime. It is important to recognise the years of one's prime, always remember that.”
― Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden.”
― Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“4:15. Not 4 not 4:30 but 4:15. She thought to intimidate me with the use of quarter hours.”
― Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“... flattening their scorn underneath the chariot wheels of her superiority.”
― Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“It's only possible to betray where loyalty is due”
― Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“What a terrible thing could be freedom. Trees were free when they were uprooted by the wind; ships were free when they were torn from their moorings; men were free when they were cast out of their homes—free to starve, free to perish of cold and hunger.”
― Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

“The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that by seeing nothing it might avoid Truth. ”
― Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

“You're neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you're as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you're unexplained as yet--you've not got your niche in creation. But some day that will come, and meanwhile don't shrink from yourself, but face yourself calmly and bravely. Have courage; do the best you can with your burden. But above all be honourable. Cling to your honour for the sake of those others who share the same burden. For their sakes show the world that people like you and they can be quite as selfless and fine as the rest of mankind. Let your life go to prove this--it would be a really great life-work, Stephen.”
― Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

“And so blinded was she by those gleams of glory which the stars fling into the eyes of young lovers, that she saw perfection where none existed..." p146”
― Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

“If our love is a sin, then heaven must be full of such tender and selfless sinning as ours.”
― Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

“In her they instinctively sensed an outlaw, and theirs was the task of policing nature.”
― Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
― Virginia Woolf

“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“what matter it if a man gaineth the whole world and loseth his own soul?”
― Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy