"I am not an eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish." Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell DBE (7 September 1887 – 9 December 1964)

“One summer morning at sunrise a long time ago I met a little girl with a book under her arm. I asked her why she was out so early and she answered that there were too many books and far too little time. And there she was absolutely right.” ― Tove Jansson

“Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.” ― Rose Macauley

"The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.” ― Elizabeth Hardwick

“She had become really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didn't listen, at sitting in other people's lives just for a minute while they talked round her.” ― Katherine Mansfield

“Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.” ― Anita Brookner

"We were those girls, the artist’s daughters, the mermaids, the ones with long, tangled hair who did what they wanted. Inside, always, we knew we were free." - Stacey D'Erasmo Portrait by René Le Bègue Portrait, 1903

“And her eyes filled with heavy, regretful tears, yet she did not quite know for what she was weeping. She only knew that some great sense of loss, some great sense of incompleteness possessed her...” ― Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness

“The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour” ― Beryl Bainbridge

"not so much quietly waiting as rather quietly living with the catastrophe of my personality and hoping to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern....." ― Frank O'Hara

“You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms...” ― Anna Akhmatova

“I was born to be a spinster, and, by God, I'm going to spin.” ― Winifred Holtby (23 June 1898 – 29 September 1935)

"I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute." -- Dame Rebecca West

“Beauty, you’re under arrest. I have a camera, and I’m not afraid to use it.” – Julia Margaret Cameron

“She disliked everything that she did know about housekeeping and could not persuade herself that it was of sufficiently intrinsic importance to justify the expenditure of time, money and nervous energy that it seemed to require.” ― E.M. Delafield

"The being I refer to as me came into the world on Monday, June 8, 1903, at about eight in the morning, in Brussels." ― Marguerite Yourcenar

"I like to use as few commas as possible so that sentences will go down in one swallow without touching the sides." ― Pamela Frankau

I regard myself as an Irish novelist. As long as I can remember I’ve been extremely conscious of being Irish even when I was writing about very unIrish things such as suburban life in Paris or the English seaside. ― Elizabeth Bowen

Give me great glaring vices and great glaring virtues but preserve me from the neat little neutral ambiguities. Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity's sake, be it to the top of your bent. ― Violet Trefusis,

“She was an Amazon. Her whole life was spent riding at breakneck speed towards the wilder shores of love.” ― Lesley Blanch

The receptacles into which Mrs Spry puts her flowers are equally varied: a wooden bowl, a silver sauce-boat, a tin-lined bible-box, and something which she calls a pancheon. #gardening www.countrylife.co.uk/luxury/art-a...

I will spend the rest of my life assembling my own mind and my own soul. I will take care of my body carefully, not that it may any more please a man, but because it houses me and therefore I am dependent upon it. ― Pearl S. Buck, Pavilion of Women Passion to Red Katia Chausheva Photography

"For in some mystic hour I shall move to the unheard rhythms of the cosmic orchestra of heaven, and you will know the language of my wordless poems and will come to me... for that is why I dance." Ruth St Denis (1917)

“You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you.” ― Isadora Duncan

“Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.” ― Anais Nin

'She was like an altar on the move.' Elizabeth Bowen on Edith Sitwell

“She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.”

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.” ― Virginia Woolf

“We can't all be happy, we can't all be rich, we can't all be lucky - and it would be so much less fun if we were... There must be the dark background to show up the bright colours. ” ― Jean Rhys

"Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle." "Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets." Edna Ferber (August 15, 1885 – April 16, 1968)

“I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself” ― Simone de Beauvoir (9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986)

Virginia Woolf, The Years 1937

"All the things that happen to us are useful even if we do not know why." ― Victoria Ocampo (7 April 1890 – 27 January 1979)

“She lived passionately on very little money and a great deal of curiosity, courage, and enthusiasm for books, nature, a cigarette, a bodice she was cutting out, a concert, a lecture, a fingernail file.” ― Violette Leduc (7 April 1907 – 28 May 1972)

“I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I’ve always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me.” ― Marguerite Duras

‘... I have a lot of work to do today; I need to slaughter memory, Turn my living soul to stone Then teach myself to live again... Anna Akhmatova

I am so thrilled to be republishing a brand new edition of Sun Horse, Moon Horse by Rosemary Sutcliff. This novel was inspired by the iconic White Horse of Uffington and is introduced by award-winning author @tiffanybaker.bsky.social Pre-orders are open! tinyurl.com/ycy636zr #booksky 💙📚

'The time seemed to move for her so slowly, like a long adagio.' Winter Sonata by Dorothy Edwards John White Alexander | A Ray Of Sunlight Cellist | 1898

“We need the slower and more lasting stimulus of solitary reading as a relief from the pressure on eye, ear and nerves of the torrent of information and entertainment pouring from ever-open electronic jaws. It could end by stupefying us.” ― Margaret Storm Jameson

"He was slightly put out to learn that Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac beat him to the Booker Prize in 1984 (his novel Small World was shortlisted) after one judge read the others a positive review of a Brookner novel that Lodge himself had written." My tribute to the late, brilliant David Lodge:

Today on my blog, a fascinating (and beautifully presented!) book from @britishlibrary.bsky.social Publishing Women Writers series - "The Camomile". More here! kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2024/12/20/d...

“Jeg har skrevet hele mit liv og nærer en romantisk drøm om at dø midt i en sætning.” ― Tove Ditlevsen "I have written all my life and have a romantic dream of dying in the middle of a sentence." Tove Irma Margit Ditlevsen (14 December 1917 – 7 March 1976)

There is an Indian proverb that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional, a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person. ― Rumer Godden

"Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dark trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more than prettiness.” ― Mary Oliver

“If one were to include one-tenth of the remarkable people one knows, in one's fiction, no one would accept it. Real life remains one's private menagerie.” ― Sylvia Townsend Warner

How perfect to be aboard a ship with maybe a hundred years still in my pocket... ― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings

“She is never alone when she has her books. Books, to her, are friends. Give her Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Meredith or Hardy, and she is lost - lost in a world of her own. She sleeps so little that most of her nights are spent reading.” ― E.M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady

Love Harriet's take on Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts at @shinynewbooks.bsky.social shinynewbooks.co.uk/lady-living-...

“She had the pathos of those hopelessly flawed objects which one often sees being put up for sale in junk shops... She reminded me of some tea-pot with a missing spout, a compass that had lost its hands, an old-fashioned record that has had all its grooves badly scratched.”