For the philosopher is right who says that nothing is thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy

Septimus has been working too hard" - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.

For the philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy

No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.

Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.

in this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow... (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house & grounds)

The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.