If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

More from The Moment and Other Essays (1948)

• A light here required a shadow there.
• A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
• For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it.
• Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
• Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
• Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.