They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad.

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

I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.

It’s better to think of my life like that— part miracle, part madness. It’s better if I accept that I can’t control any of the things that matter. My life is a trail of shipwrecks and set-sails. There are no arrivals, no destinations; there are only sandbanks and shipwreck; then another boat, another tide.

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

That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.

You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?