I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.

Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say 'good to eat' when they mean 'beautiful' and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.