“Woolf turned her back on a number of tokens of her rising eminence in the 1930s, including an offer of the Companion of Honour award, an invitation from Cambridge University to give the Clark lectures, and honorary doctorate degrees from Manchester University and Liverpool University.‘It is an utterly corrupt society,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘. . . & I will take nothing that it can give me”

“In the end I sort of though we created a companion who was so alive and dynamic and so wedded to the doctor that you’d need a whole universe to contain her in. The only way to get rid of her is to send her into a parallel world from which she can never return; otherwise she would stay with the doctor forever.”

“Don't be afraid to make an ass of yourself. I do it all the time, and look what I got." (Spoken at a graduation ceremony while holding aloft an honorary doctoral degree from McGill University)”

“The university awarded me my degree, but can something that’s basically worthless be properly called an award?”

“I love her beyond the universe and back. I love her from this world to the next.”

“Because she deserved more than me. She deserved someone who could give her the whole universe.”