Virginia Woolf

A tearing wind last night. A flurry of red clouds, hard, a water colour mass of purple and black, soft as a water ice, then hard slices of intense green stone, blue stone and a ripple of crimson light.

The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

To enjoy freedom . . . we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose.

Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.