Even the most solid of things, and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light.

Writing is both bomb and bomb disposal-a necessary shattering of cliche and assumption, and a powerful defusing of the soul-destroying messages of modern life (that nothing matters, nothing changes, money is everything, etc). Writing is a state of being as well as an act of doing.

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

We are lucky, even the worst of us, for daylight comes.

Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.

I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.

She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.