Orlando was unaccountably disappointed. She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses.

And since beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful, and he is static, his life stagnates in a china sea.

How was one to lasso her mind, and tether it to this minute, unimportant spot?

To upset everything every 3 or 4 years is my notion of a happy life.

Habits gradually change the face of one's life as time changes one's physical face; & one does not know it.

She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup. as if there was an eddy--there--and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it.

Queer, I mused, to see what we were thinking five years ago.

Swelling, perpetually augmented, there is a vast accumulation of unrecorded matter in my head.

Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall... Here is something definite, something real. thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is proof of some existence other than ours.

They neither work nor weep; in their shape is their reason.

Sometimes he woke with a brain like lead; at others it was as if a thousand wax tapers were alight and people were throwing fireworks inside him.

As for himself, when he went to go to a party, as one was sometimes obliged to, from a wish not to give offence, he walked into the middle of the room, said 'Ha! Ha!' as loud as ever he could, considered he had done his duty, and went home.