- Harold Nicolson: I hear nothing but reports of her madness.
- Vita Sackville-West: Madness, what a convenient way to explain away her genius.
- Harold Nicolson: Marriage is more like a plant, in need of constant nuture.
- Vita Sackville-West: Men tend to regard themselves the plant, and women the soil.
- Virginia Woolf: Why do you think your books sell more than mine?
- Vita Sackville-West: Popularity was never a sign of genius.
- Virginia Woolf: The end is already written. Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views and to feel himself forever and ever alone.
- Virginia Woolf: Now when was the moment of your greatest disillusionment?
- Vita Sackville-West: The first time I saw a penis.
- Harold Nicolson: Biographies can enlarge our understanding of who people really are by hanging up mirrors in odd corners.
- Virginia Woolf: You're an exploding star refracting light across the universe. But it means you are incapable of shining your light on one thing, on one person alone.
- Virginia Woolf: How little we know anyone. Only movements. Gestures. Nothing connected continuous profound.
- Virginia Woolf: Orlando had become a woman, there is no denying it. At the age of 30, this young nobleman had not only had every experience that life has to offer but had seen the worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition women and poets were all equally vain. Literature was a farce. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust dogs and nature an elkhound and a rosebush. The world in all its variety life in all its complexity had shrunk to that.
- Leonard Woolf: I often think romance is just not altogether knowing the other person. It's the not knowing that drives one mad.
- Virginia Woolf: The touch of a hand gives the sense that one is sinking through the center of the earth. The moment becomes harder stained by the desire to be loved to be held close by another shape.
- Virginia Woolf: I've lived in you so long that now I see you. I wonder do you exist or have I made you up?
- Virginia Woolf: It's all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. A sight, an emotion, creates a wave in the mind long before you have the words to describe it. When writing, that is what you must recapture. That wave as it breaks and tumbles in the mind. If you listen, it will make the words to fit it.
- Virginia Woolf: Do you ever feel that you record things rather than feel them? Oh, you're tearing open that old wound.
- Virginia Woolf: The moment becomes harder stained by the desire to be loved to be held close by another shape.