"A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it."

"It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."

"Across the broad continent of a woman’s life, her biography is almost entirely a blank."

"Heavens, how I like to be alone!"

"As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking."

"A farm, a house, a garden, a small income, and the work that one chooses and loves—that is the good life."

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."

"The human figure even at its best is a very poor piece of work compared with the flowers and the trees."

"Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for."

"What is the meaning of life? That was all — a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years."

"I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me."

"A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind of the reader."

"Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end."

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