In marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house.
Virginia WoolfThe only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
Virginia WoolfAs an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.
Virginia WoolfIt is only by putting it into words that I make it whole. This wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together
Virginia WoolfHere I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.
Virginia Woolf