Lucy Fu > Lucy's Quotes

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
― Virginia Woolf

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
― Virginia Woolf

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
― Virginia Woolf

“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own / Three Guineas

“I am rooted, but I flow.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”
― Virginia Woolf

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.”
― Toni Morrison, Jazz

“You are your best thing”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless ... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever."

[Interview with CBS radio host Don Swaim, September 15, 1987.]”
― Toni Morrison

“... we
do not admire what
we cannot understand.”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“Your thorns are the best part of you.”
― Marianne Moore

“The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.”
― Marianne Moore

“Nearly everything I know about love, I've learnt from my long-term friendships with women.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.”
― Sharon Olds

“L'art

Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.”
― Ezra Pound

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“If you don't like someone's story, write your own.”
― Chinua Achebe

“The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.”
― Chinua Achebe