Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.

I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.

You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.

That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.

Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence