Only the impossible is worth the effort.

What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.

If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.

I am getting much more political as I get older. It's the duty of any writer, in particular, not to stand back from the world.

I learned capacity for self-reflection very early, finding it through interior monologues that books are so good at and that visual media is so bad at because it's so boring - nothing's happening. In a book, you can be inside the narrator's head for 50 pages, and nothing needs to happen. Then you learn to be inside your own head without something needing to happen. It's a very good antidote to a crazy, restless, "what's next?" culture - that you can just be in your own head and nothing is happening except that this is a rich place. I love that.

Every believer is an anarchist at heart. True believers would rather see governments topple and history rewritten than scuff the cover of their faith.

Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position.