Quotes About Insight

For one's children so often gave one's own perceptions a little thrust forwards.

All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.

One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she reflected. Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought.

I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humor, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment.

I like observing people. I like looking at things.

I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.

Life's what you see in people's eyes; life's what they learn, and, having learnt it, never, though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware of -- what? That life's like that, it seems.

I know this room too well - this view too well - I am getting it all out of focus, because I can't walk through it.

As I write, there rises somewhere in my head that queer and very pleasant sense of something which I want to write; my own point of view...

I am not sinuous or suave; I sit among you abrading your softness with my hardness, quenching the silver-grey flickering moth-wing quiver of words with the green spurt of my clear eyes.

It is the duty of the writer to describe.

Oh, to awake from dreaming!

We shall be the mouthpieces of the divine spirit—

Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.

The common fund of experience is very deep.

Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.

I have had my vision

Desiring truth, awaiting it, laboriously distilling a few words, forever desiring ---

She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup. as if there was an eddy--there--and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it.

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.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

She felt that if only one could begin things at the beginning, one might see more clearly upon what foundations they now rest.

Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified.

You must remember that fiction is the mirror of life.