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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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Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

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alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the att...more

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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 spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of th...more

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To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon w...more

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The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to...more

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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