Isabel > Recent Status Updates

“though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run her through the body with his pen”

“Per quarant’anni di seguito sono rimasto laggiù, ad ascoltar da una fessura queste vostre parole. E se adesso sono stato io a inventarmela, è perché solamente queste potevano essere inventate.”

“io non credo nemmeno a una parola […] di quel che ho buttato giù su questi fogli! O meglio, forse ci credo anche, ma al tempo stesso, non so perché, intuisco e sospetto di mentire”

“Voi mi griderete […] che nessuno ha intenzione di togliermi la mia libertà; che qui ci si sta soltanto adoperando per far sì che le cose si organizzino in modo che la mia libera volontà […] venga a coincidere con i miei normali interessi, con le leggi della natura e con l’aritmetica. […] ma quale libera volontà mi resterà più […] ?”

“c’è solamente un caso in cui l’uomo possa […] desiderare per sé qualcosa che gli sia persino dannoso, qualcosa di stupido […] ed è appunto quando vuol avere il diritto di desiderare per sé foss’anche la più stupida delle cose, e non essere vincolato dall’obbligo di desiderare solamente le cose intelligenti.”

“lo sapevo benissimo che non c’era nessun motivo d’offendersi, che era tutta una posa, e cionondimeno arrivavo a un punto tale che alla fin fine mi sentivo sul serio offeso”

“Per quarant’anni di seguito rivedrà nella memoria l’offesa subita, sino ai minimi e più vergognosi dettagli […]. Potrà magari anche cominciare a vendicarsi, ma soltanto così, a pezzi e bocconi, nelle cose minime […] in questo consapevole seppellire se stessi ancora vivi, per il gran dolore, nel sottosuolo”

“per quanto la rigiri, alla fin fine vien sempre fuori che il principale colpevole di tutto sei sempre tu, tu e nessun altro, e —quel che fa più male — colpevole senza colpa e, potremmo dire, per legge di natura.”

“Era come se quello fosse il mio stato normale, e per null’affatto una qualche mia malattia o una qualche perversione, tant’è vero che alla fine m’era passata persino la voglia d’oppormici”

“E mi tormentavano fino alla vergogna; fino alle convulsioni m’avevano portato, e… m’erano venuti a noia.”

“in sostanza non avrei mai potuto essere veramente cattivo. Ero perpetuamente consapevole di come vi fossero in me tantissimi elementi quantomai in contraddizione con ciò. Li sentivo che mi brulicavano dentro, quegli elementi di contraddizione. Sapevo che era tutta la vita che brulicavano in me, e che chiedevano di poter uscire fuori, ma io non li lasciavo uscire, no e no, apposta non li lasciavo venir fuori”

“I am reminded by dipping into newspapers and novels and biographies that when a woman speaks to women she should have something very unpleasant up her sleeve. Women are hard on women. Women dislike women. […] What can I think of? The truth is, I often like women.”

“Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor”

“Then Alan got up and the shadow of Alan at once obliterated Phoebe. For Alan had views and Phoebe was quenched in the flood of his views.”

“The Suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self-assertion; it must have made them lay an emphasis upon their own sex and its characteristics which they would not have troubled to think about had they not been challenged.”

“A true picture of a man as whole can never be painted until a woman has described that spot the size of a shilling.”

“The poet was forced to be passionate or bitter, unless indeed he cos’è to ‘hate women’, which meant more often than not that he was unattractive to them.”

“almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. […] and how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or sort spectacles which sex puts upon his nose.”

“she was afraid […] of being called ‘sentimental’ perhaps; or she remembers that women’s writing has been called flowery and so provides a superfluity of thorns”

“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.”

“This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feeling of women in a drawing-room.”

“One must submit to the social convention, and be ‘cut off from what is called the world’. At the same time, on the other side of Europe, there was a young man living freely with this gipsy or with that great lady; […] picking up unhindered and uncensored all that varied experience of human life which served him so splendidly later when he came to write his books.”

“Even if her father did not read out loud these opinion, any girl could read them for herself; and the reading […] must have lowered her vitality […]. There would always have been that assertion—you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that—to protest against, to overcome.”

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, […] then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, […] some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.”

“She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she’s all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. […] some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read”

“it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble […] without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks”

“Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quantity, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority”

“His was the power and the money and the influence. […] He will decide if the hair on the meat ax is human; he it is who will acquit or convict the murderer, and hang him, or let him go free. With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry. […] it seemed absurd, I thought, […], that a man with all this power should be angry.”