No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party - for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue - but these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water.
Virginia WoolfIt would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
Virginia WoolfBut why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.
Virginia Woolf