Great Throughts Treasury

"They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and then do what other people do when they have done it."

"They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within."

"They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travelers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought."

"They never pulled the curtains till it was too dark to see, nor shut the windows till it was too cold. Why shut out the day before it was over? The flowers were still bright; the birds chirped. You could see more in the evening often when nothing interrupted, when there was no fish to order, no telephone to answer."

"They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort."

"This I say is the present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are attached."

"Think of me, the uneducated child reading books in my room at 22 Hyde Park Gate -- now advanced to this glory... Yes; all that reading, I say, has borne this odd fruit. And I am pleased."

"Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death ... others through sheer inability to cross the street."

"This is not “writing” at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."

"This is one of the tortures and miseries of life: our friends when they are unable to finish their stories."

"This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room."

"This last week L. has been having a little temperature in the evening, due to malaria, and that due to a visit to Oxford; a place of death and decay. I'm almost alarmed to see how entirely my weight rests on his prop. And almost alarmed to see how intensely I'm specialized. My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child – wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry."

"This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears."

"This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say."

"Thoughts are divine."

"Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England."

"Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night … shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves."

"Time flaps on the mast."

"Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory."

"To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others."

"Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference."

"To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves."

"To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province."

"To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father."

"To enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot."

"To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world."

"To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it — the poets and the novelists — can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma — a mirage. To make our meaning plain — Orlando could come home from one of these routs at three or four in the morning with cheeks like a Christmas tree and eyes like stars. She would untie a lace, pace the room a score of times, untie another lace, stop, and pace the room again. Often the sun would be blazing over Southwark chimneys before she could persuade herself to get into bed, and there she would lie, pitching and tossing, laughing and sighing for an hour or longer before she slept at last. And what was all this stir about? Society. And what had society said or done to throw a reasonable lady into such an excitement? In plain language, nothing. Rack her memory as she would, next day Orlando could never remember a single word to magnify into the name something. Lord O. had been gallant. Lord A. polite. The Marquis of C. charming. Mr. M. amusing. But when she tried to recollect in what their gallantry, politeness, charm, or wit had consisted, she was bound to suppose her memory at fault, for she could not name a thing. It was the same always. Nothing remained over the next day, yet the excitement of the moment was intense. Thus we are forced to conclude that society is one of those brews such as skilled housekeepers serve hot about Christmas time, whose flavour depends upon the proper mixing and stirring of a dozen different ingredients. Take one out, and it is in itself insipid. Take away Lord O., Lord A., Lord C., or Mr. M. and separately each is nothing. Stir them all together and they combine to give off the most intoxicating of flavours, the most seductive of scents. Yet this intoxication, this seductiveness, entirely evade our analysis. At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever. Such monsters the poets and the novelists alone can deal with; with such something-nothings their works are stuffed out to prodigious size; and to them with the best will in the world we are content to leave it."

"To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable."

"To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then to put it away."

"To leave a door shut that might be open is in my eyes some form of blasphemy."

"To love makes one solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody, not even Septimus now."

"To possess one single thing (it is Louis now) must waver, like the light in and out of the beech leaves; and then words, moving darkly, in the depths of your mind will break up this knot of hardness, screwed in your pocket-handkerchief."

"To let the light of the world flood back-to say this has not happened! But why turn one's head hither and thither? This is the truth. This is fact."

"To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the think veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bend her head as if to let her pelt f jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked."

"To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality."

"To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off."

"To talk of 'prizing her open' as if she were an oyster, to use any but the finest and subtlest and most pliable tools upon her was impious and absurd."

"To teach without zest is a crime."

"To upset everything every 3 or 4 years is my notion of a happy life."

"To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy."

"To walk alone in London is the greatest rest."

"Tragedies come in the hungry hours."

"Tom’s great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face — as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought."

"To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone."

"Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped."

"To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!"

"To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad."

"Twice Flush had done his utmost to kill his enemy; twice he had failed. And why had he failed, he asked himself? Because he loved Miss Barrett. Looking up at her from under his eyebrows as she lay, severe and silent on the sofa, he knew that he must love her for ever. Things are not simple but complex. If he bit Mr. Browning he bit her too. Hatred is not hatred; hatred is also love."

"Up goes the rocket. Its golden grain falls, fertilizing, upon the rich soil of my imagination."

"Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing."