Sam

“You look, eat, smile, are bored, pleased, annoyed - that is all I know. Yet this shadow which has sat by me for an hour or two, this mask from which peep two eyes, has power to drive me back, to pinion me down among all those other faces, to shut me in a hot room; to send me dashing like a moth from candle to candle.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Loneliness is the diary keeper’s lover. It is not narcissism that takes them to their desk every day. And who “keeps” whom, after all? The diary is demanding; it imposes its routine; it must be chored the way one must milk a cow; and it alters your attitude toward life, which is lived, finally, only in order that it may makes it way to the private page.

[From "Fifty Literary Pillars", p.35]”
― William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts

“Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“My belief is that if we live another century or so — I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals — and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton's bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own