Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.

“Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don’t fool.”

“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”

“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.”

I clung to my ferocious habits, yet half despised them; I continued my war against civilization, and yet entertained a wish to belong to it.

“I will not say do not weep, for not all tears are an evil.”

“The mind is beautiful because of the paradox. It uses itself to understand itself.”

Please don't expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.

It all comes down to trying to experience tedium in a way that does not hurt.

“People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless.”

“‘You said I killed you — haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe — I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, god! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!’”

“A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.”

"Today I shall study my scars. In them, I shall read the story of my life. Every moment of hurt will be a paragraph, every dysfunctional relationship a page. From the ugliness of loss and pain and injustice will emerge the beauty of creation."

How extraordinarily unwilled by me but potent in its own right, by the way, Orlando was! As if it shoved everything aside to come into existence.