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It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical...more

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How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

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Why should a real chair be better than an imaginary elephant?

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It was a desire, an echo, a sound; she could drape it in color, see it in form, hear it in music, but not in words; no, never in words. She sighed, te...more

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Freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art.

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I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

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What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice ...more

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I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.

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One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and...more

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. . . there were masses of pictures she had not seen; however, Lily Briscoe reflected, perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one h...more

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And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that intermittent music...more

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She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned a...more

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In the flailing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances