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“No amount of security is worth the suffering of a mediocre life, chained to a routine that has killed your dreams.”
― Maya Mendoza

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
― Virginia Woolf

“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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

“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”
― Virginia Woolf

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

“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

“All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“What matters is precisely this; the unspoken at the edge of the spoken.”
― Virginia Woolf

“To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty â€� it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life â€� froze it.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports.”
― P.D. James, The Lighthouse

“You come and see me among flowers and pictures, and think me mysterious, romantic, and all the rest of it. Being yourself very inexperienced and very emotional, you go home and invent a story about me, and now you can't separate me from the person you've imagined me to be. You call that, I suppose, being in love; as a matter of fact it's being in delusion.”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.”
― W.C. Fields

“Failing and Flying"

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.”
― Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven: Poems

“Sometimes I felt sure he was—like there was an invisible, unbreakable string that ran between us, stretching vast distances and keeping us joined.”
― Carley Fortune, Every Summer After