To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable. - Virginia Woolf

Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jaques — literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.

I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?