"Hang still, then, quiver, life, soul, spirit, whatever you are of Minnie Marsh—I, too, on my flower—the hawk over the down—alone, or what were the worth of life? To rise; hang still in the evening, in the midday; hang still over the down. The flicker of the hand—off, up! then poised again. Alone, unseen; seeing all so still down there, all so lovely. None seeing, none caring. The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. Air above, air below. And the moon and immortality…"

Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House

"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it"

Roald Dahl (via sweetcheeksaremadeofthese)

"I cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or mix with other people."

Virginia Woolf, from The Waves (via violentwavesofemotion)

(via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)

"I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes."

Nabokov’s interview, BBC Television [1962]

(via bookmania)

(via spirallingmadness)

"The sky creaks with the plumes of unread poets."

(via petrichour)

(Source: light-essence, via distancenouveau)

"Sweet miracle of our empty hands."

Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, trans. Pamela Morris (via proustitute)

"The unfed mind devours itself."

Gore Vidal (via larmoyante)

"There are things I’d rather whisper and never quite say out loud."

Virginia Woolf in a diary entry dated 20 July 1938 (via larmoyante)

"He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace."

Leo Tolstoy - The Death of Ivan Ilych  (via ounu)

(Source: thosewings, via ounu)

"Did I say that she was beautiful? I was wrong. Beauty is too tame a notion; it evokes only faces in magazines. A lovely eloquence, a calming symmetry; none of that describes this woman’s face. So perhaps I should assume I cannot do it justice with words. Suffice it to say that it would break your heart to see her; and it would mend what was broken in the same moment; and you would be twice what you’d been before."

Clive Barker (via stuff—n—things)