I keep myself locked as a box when it matters, and broken open when it doesn't matter at all.

Cheating is easy. There's no swank to infidelity. To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there's nothing there.

We're here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.

The impulse to worship is impossible to eradicate. Even the most prosaic have to worship something.

What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?

London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.

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