“Elizabeth's voice had a door in it. When you opened that door you found another door, and that door opened yet another door. All the doors were nice and led out of her.”
― Richard Brautigan
1907 Lenore, Joseph Keiley
"I am not an eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish."
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell DBE
(7 September 1887 – 9 December 1964)
“One summer morning at sunrise a long time ago
I met a little girl with a book under her arm.
I asked her why she was out so early and
she answered that there were too many books and
far too little time. And there she was absolutely right.”
― Tove Jansson
“Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.”
― Rose Macauley
"The greatest gift is the passion for reading.
It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites,
it gives you knowledge of the world and experience
of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick
“She had become really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didn't listen, at sitting in other people's lives just for a minute while they talked round her.”
― Katherine Mansfield
“Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.”
― Anita Brookner
"We were those girls, the artist’s daughters, the mermaids, the ones with long, tangled hair who did what they wanted. Inside, always, we knew we were free."
- Stacey D'Erasmo
Portrait by René Le Bègue Portrait, 1903
“And her eyes filled with heavy, regretful tears, yet she did not quite know for what she was weeping. She only knew that some great sense of loss, some great sense of incompleteness possessed her...”
― Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
“The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour”
― Beryl Bainbridge
"not so much quietly waiting as rather quietly living with the catastrophe of my personality and hoping to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern....."
― Frank O'Hara
Add Kennedy (2014) and Gibbons (2011) to Vintage’s PCBA dept.
“You will hear thunder and remember me,
and think: she wanted storms...”
― Anna Akhmatova
Oh Verity, I'm so sorry. Raindrops of tears. 💔
“I was born to be a spinster, and, by God, I'm going to spin.”
― Winifred Holtby (23 June 1898 – 29 September 1935)
"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 or a prostitute."
-- Dame Rebecca West
“Beauty, you’re under arrest. I have a camera, and I’m not afraid to use it.” – Julia Margaret Cameron
“She disliked everything that she did know about housekeeping and could not persuade herself that it was of sufficiently intrinsic importance to justify the expenditure of time, money and nervous energy that it seemed to require.”
― E.M. Delafield
"The being I refer to as me came into the world on Monday,
June 8, 1903, at about eight in the morning, in Brussels."
― Marguerite Yourcenar
"I like to use as few commas as possible so that sentences will go down in one swallow without touching the sides."
― Pamela Frankau
I regard myself as an Irish novelist. As long as I can remember I’ve been extremely conscious of being Irish even when I was writing about very unIrish things such as suburban life in Paris or the English seaside.
― Elizabeth Bowen
Give me great glaring vices and great glaring virtues but preserve me from the neat little neutral ambiguities. Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity's sake, be it to the top of your bent.
― Violet Trefusis,
“She was an Amazon. Her whole life was spent riding at breakneck speed towards the wilder shores of love.”
― Lesley Blanch
The receptacles into which Mrs Spry puts her flowers are equally varied: a wooden bowl, a silver sauce-boat, a tin-lined bible-box, and something which she calls a pancheon. #gardening www.countrylife.co.uk/luxury/art-a...
I will spend the rest of my life assembling my own mind and my own soul. I will take care of my body carefully, not that it may any more please a man, but because it houses me and therefore I am dependent upon it.
― Pearl S. Buck, Pavilion of Women
Passion to Red
Katia Chausheva Photography
"For in some mystic hour I shall move to the unheard rhythms of the cosmic orchestra of heaven, and you will know the language of my wordless poems and will come to me... for that is why I dance."
Ruth St Denis (1917)
“You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you.”
― Isadora Duncan
“Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.”
― Anais Nin
'She was like an altar on the move.'
Elizabeth Bowen on Edith Sitwell
“She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.”
