Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.
— Persuasion
Quotes About Life
You are, madame, so perfectly armoured, so completely sure of yourself.''Now I wonder, if I am to take that as a compliment?''It is, perhaps, a warning--not to treat life with arrogance.
— Murder in the Mews
Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.
— Siddhartha
Limitation of one's freedom might seem to be something negative and unpleasant, but love makes it a positive, joyful and creative thing. Freedom exists for the sake of love.
— Love and Responsibility
Utterly sure of himself, convinced of his power, certain that the laws that governed other men couldn't touch him, he made straight for any goal he set himself, however rarified and dazzling, even if it were folly for anyone else to even consider it.
— The Three Musketeers
Distance sometimes lets you know who is worth keeping, and who is worth letting go.
The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
— Orlando
Blessed with so many resources within myself the world was not necessary to me. I could do very well without it.
— Emma
Take away from love the fullness of self surrender, the completeness of personal commitment, and what remains will be a total denial and negation of it.
— Love and Responsibility
I mean that success has come early. And that is dangerous. Always dangerous.
— The Mysterious Mr. Quin
— To the Lighthouse
I plead with you--never, ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid.
— Pope John Paul II: In My Own Words
Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.
— The Waves
For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there mustbe between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and shehim.
— Mrs. Dalloway