I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues. That is all.
There is a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.
Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.
I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure as a test of value.
It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires.
People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
Yes,β said Mamma, βthis is the worst of life, that love does not give us common sense but is a sure way of losing it. We love people, and we say that we are going to do more for them than friendship, but it makes such fools of us that we do far less, indeed sometimes what we do could be mistaken for the work of hatred.
A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.
There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.
Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
But there are other things than dissipation that thicken the features. Tears, for example.
