Quotes about Expression

Sometimes it seems to me that I shall never write out all the books I have in my head, because of the strain. The devilish thing about writing is that it calls upon every nerve to hold itself taut. This is exactly what I cannot do--

Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.

It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the dark paths of the mind and enter the past, to visit books, to brush aside their branches and break off some fruit.

What she said in To the Lighthouse of Lily Briscoe's art she might have said of her own: that the pen was 'the one dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos . . .',73 and the godlike power she felt as a writer is perfectly embodied in a passage from that novel.

It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for. Reality dwelling in what one saw and felt, but did not talk about, one could accept a system in which things went round and round quite satisfactorily to other people, without often troubling to think about it, except as something superficially strange.

Never did anybody look so sad.

Thus, when one takes a sentence of Mr B into the mind it falls plump to the ground— dead; but when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.

Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.

Nothing happens here except that I write and write, and curse and burn.

"Our armies swore terribly in Flanders," cried my uncle Toby—"but nothing to this."

"It wasn't the wine," murmured Mr. Snodgrass, in a broken voice. "It was the salmon."

An idea, like a ghost (according to the common notion of ghosts), must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.