What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once |
What is meant by ''reality''? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying |
When a subject is highly controversial... one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. |
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly. |
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. |
Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe. |
Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body? |
Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women? |
Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradles. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. |
Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time |
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man, at twice its natural size |
You cannot find peace by avoiding life. |
You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort. |
Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse? |