One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
What does the brain matter compared with the heart?
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is…at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away…
It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of treesand changing leaves.
She felt… how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
The beauty of the world…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure
No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.
in this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow… (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house & grounds)
Septimus has been working too hard” – that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it’s place?
Like” and “like” and “like”–but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins–of happiness and unhappiness.
About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.
For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.
When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.
Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?
Death is woven in with the violets,” said Louis. “Death and again death.”)
They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.]
Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.
Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
For it would seem – her case proved it – that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.
As for my next book, I won’t write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.
But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.
The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.
He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line.
No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes
Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!
But love…it’s only an illusion. A story one makes up in one’s mind about another person. And one knows all the time it isn’t true. Of course one knows why one’s always taking care not to destroy the illusion.
Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease?
I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it’s ripe; it will be exquisite by September.
I should need to be a herd of elephants, I thought, and a wilderness of spiders, desperately referring to the animals that are reputed longest lived and most multitudinously eyed, to cope with all of this.
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don’t budge though armies cross them.
anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned–in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
She liked getting hold of some book… and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one.
They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
What’s the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?
Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.
You send a girl to school in order to make friends – the right sort.
Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their stories.
This idea struck me: the army is the body : I am the brain. Thinking is my fighting. (15 May 1940)
Yes, our old age is not going to be sunny orchard drowse. By shutting down the fire curtain, though, I find I can live in the moment; which is good; why yield a moment to regret or envy or worry? Why indeed? (24 December 1940)
This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing.
You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one.
The immense success of our life, is I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it.
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.
As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.
Once she knows how to read there’s only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.
For we think back through our mothers if we are women.
This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
Chastity … has, even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.
One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man
Literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women
A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life.
I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?
One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy.
It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.
I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.
In the flailing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances
Why should a real chair be better than an imaginary elephant?
Freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art.
I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.
I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.
I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.
Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.
Do you know I get such a passion for reading sometimes its like the other passion -writing- only the wrong side of the carpet.
In reading we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river
We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.
Buy for me from the King’s own kennels, the finest elk hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring them back without delay. For,” he murmured, scarcely above his breath as he turned to his books, “I have done with men.
But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.
For ourselves, who are ordinary men and women, let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every one of the senses she has given us.
I am extremely happy walking on the downs…I like to have space to spread my mind out in.
So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball
With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes — one of the tragedies of married life.
They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did.
The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful.
I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.
…it struck her, this was tragedy– not palls, dust, and the shroud; but children coerced, their spirits subdued.
For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said.
And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction.
…to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.
All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.
It is much more important to be oneself than anything else.
Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority.
Possible then the professor inited a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of omen, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his superiority.
I should never be able to fulfill what is,I understand, the first duty of a lecturer-to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever”.
Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified.
How then did it work out, this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?
If you drink the good wine of the noble countess, you have to entertain her less desirable friends.
For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not – Heaven help us – all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit?
Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life?
The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the wind, flashed into Rachel’s mind, and she became profoundly excited at the thought of living.
The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order
I’ll be blasted’, he said, ‘if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I’ll write, from this day forward, to please myself
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.
The fact about contemporaries is that they’re doing the same thing on another railway line: one resents their distracting one, flashing past, the wrong way- something like that: from timidity, partly, one keeps one’s eyes on one’s own road.
Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and white?
the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string
She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose.
I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.
When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.
The voice of protest is the voice of another and an ancient civilization which seems to have bred in us the instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and understand.
for she could never think of anything to say to Clarissa, though she liked her. She had lots of fine qualities; but they had nothing in common – she and Clarissa.
Your image has receded till it is like the thinnest shadow of the old moon… a thin silver edge appeared, and now you hang like a sickle over my life.
Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she did not think of tears at first) which, without disturbing the firmness of her lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks. She had perfect control of herself-Oh, yes!-in every other way.
Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago.
Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.
The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks—so it sounded.
There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.
Up goes the rocket. Its golden grain falls, fertilising, upon the rich soil of my imagination.
I use my friends rather as giglamps : There’s another field I see: by your light. Over there’s a hill. I widen my landscape.
It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven…
These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.
If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills – than my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.
How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.
. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.
To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.
It was a desire, an echo, a sound; she could drape it in color, see it in form, hear it in music, but not in words; no, never in words. She sighed, teased by desires so incoherent, so incommunicable.
But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.
I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.
How could one leap on the back of life and wring its scruff?
I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.
And the supreme mystery was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?
And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.
This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.
When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.
I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.
Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.
She came from the most worthless of classes – the rich, with a smattering of culture.
Like all feelings felt for oneself, Mrs. Ramsay thought, it made one sad. It was so inadequate, what one could give in return; and what Rose felt was quite out of proportion to anything she actually was.
The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme — thinking too much.
Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens.
Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels, he thought…
All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.
Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with these silences.
We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.
They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love
Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and butter
Kind old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always go to a good man, they say[.]
How could any Lord have made this world?… there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for this world to commit… No happiness lasted.
They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.
She seemed a compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine …
What is nobler,” she mused, turning over the photographs, “than to be a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty?
Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these – ‘Chloe liked Olivia…’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.
I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual
The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.
Let us not take it for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.
Pale, with dark hair, the one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here.
I reach my object and say, Wander no more. All else is trial and make-believe.
Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted; had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses.
For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there mustbe between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and shehim.
I burn, I shiver, out of this sun, into this shadow.
. . . distant views seemed to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest.
Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
Talk of solitude (…). It is the last resort of the civilised: our souls are so creased and soured in meaning we can only unfold them when we are alone. (5/4/1927 – From a Letter to Vita Sackville-West)
I begin to be impatient of solitude – to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me.
But we-‘ she glanced at him as if to ascertain his position, ‘we see each other only now and then-”Like lights in a storm-”In the midst of a hurricane,’ she concluded, as the window shook beneath the pressure of the wind.
My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.
The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness
But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything.
Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.
alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know
He is precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the rest of his life.
I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.
It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.
There is a coherence in things, a stability; something… is immune from change and shines out… in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.
Here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?
When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.
the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water
One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.
The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
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.
She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
It was awful, he cried, awful, awful!Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.
Why, after all, did she do these things? Why seek pinnacles and stand drenched in fire? Might it consume her anyhow! Burn her to cinders! Better anything, better brandish one’s torch and hurl it to earth than taper and dwindle away
His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at their feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.
But when she looked at Prue tonight, she saw this was not now quite true of her. She was just beginning, just moving, just descending.
Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes.
To sit and contemplate – to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are.
She sighed, she snored, not that she was asleep, only drowsy and heavy, drowsy and heavy, like a field of clover in the sunshine this hot July day, with the bees going round and about and the yellow butterflies.
I am reading Henry James… and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
For if it is rash to walk into a lion’s den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on top of St. Paul’s, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet.
Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.
And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known byher shoes and her gloves.
Those ruffians, the Gods, shan’t have it all their own way,– her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady.
No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.
so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again…
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.
How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?
To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!
The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.
[Shakespeare} the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping
What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included.
It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.
For if it is rash to walk into a lion’s den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St Paul’s, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet
. . . there were masses of pictures she had not seen; however, Lily Briscoe reflected, perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one’s own work.
One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.
Roses,” she thought sardonically, “All trash, m’dear.
He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.
Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading–I like reading books in the bulk.
I have lost friends some by death … others by sheer inability to cross the street.
I have lost friends some by death … others by sheer inability to cross the street.
I have lost friends some by death … others by sheer inability to cross the street.
I have lost friends some by death … others by sheer inability to cross the street.
I have lost friends some by death … others by sheer inability to cross the street.
I have lost friends some by death … others by sheer inability to cross the street.
I have lost friends some by death … others by sheer inability to cross the street.
I have lost friends some by death … others by sheer inability to cross the street.
Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.
I have lost friends some by death … others by sheer inability to cross the street.
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning it satisfies the senses amazingly.
Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known euphemistically as the stately homes of England.
Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
Life is a luminous halo a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning.
A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowhip with other human beings as we take our place among them.
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
The first duty of a lecturer- to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever.
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book shown to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
It is in our idleness in our dreams that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are perhaps the most discussed animal in the universe?
He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
As for my next book I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear pendant gravid asking to be cut or it will fall.
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.
The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.