Orlando: A Biography Quotes

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

When the shrivelled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning it satisfies the senses amazingly.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.

Love, the poet has said, is woman’s whole existence.

I am growing up. I am losing some illusions, perhaps to acquire others.

For it would seem – her case proved it – that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life; every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.

All extremes of feeling are allied to madness.

A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run her through the body with his pen.