Quotes from Virginia Woolf

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.

Partly for that reason, its secrecy, complete and inviolable, he had found life like an unknown garden, full of turns and corners, surprising, yes; really it took one's breath away, these moments; there coming to him by the pillar-box opposite the British Museum one of them, a moment, in which things came together; this ambulance; and life and death.

The present participle is the Devil himself, she thought, now that we are in the place for believing in Devils.

The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second.

she felt, with her hand on the nursery door, that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically (the feeling was one of relief and happiness) it was all one stream...

We ain't popular--we sit in corners and look like mutes who are longing for a funeral.

Little Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life but could be unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally, by this sort of thing––poor women waiting to see the Queen go past––poor women, nice little children, orphans, widows, the War––tut tut––actually had tears in his eyes.

so that it may grow fatter and

The strongest natures, when they are influenced, submit the most unreservedly; it is perhaps a sign of their strength.

At last the play was ended. All had grown dark. The tears streamed down his face. Looking up into the sky there was nothing but blackness there too. Ruin and death, he thought, cover all. The life of man ends in the grave. Worms devour us. Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe Should yawn Ã¢â'¬â€

Gold runs in our blood.

Here is a hall where one pays money and goes in, where one hears music among somnolent people who have come here after lunch on a hot afternoon. We have eaten beef and pudding enough to live for a week without tasting food. Therefore we cluster like maggots on the back of some thing that will carry us on.

Haftalard?r, mutsuz olduÄŸu için olaylara baÅŸka anlamlar yüklüyordu; ara s?ra yoldan geçen temiz yüzlü, iyi kiÅŸileri durdurup Mutsuzum demek geliyordu içinden, yolda ÅŸark? söyleyen bu ihtiyar kad?n, her ÅŸeyin düzeleceÄŸine inand?r?rd? Lucrezia'y?. ... Ne saçma bir düÅŸtü mutsuzluk.

I'm convinced people are wrong when they say it's work that wears one; it's responsibility.

Every word they said now would be true.) Do say something, she thought, wishing only to hear his voice. For the shadow, the thing folding them in was beginning, she felt, to close round her again. Say anything, she begged, looking at him, as if for help.

Habits gradually change the face of ones life as time changes one's physical face;& one does not know it.

So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.

There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional) a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals.

I am one who will force himself to desert these windy and moonlit territories, these midnight wanderings, and confront grained oak doors. I will achieve in my life - heaven grant that it be not long - some gigantic amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to me. Out of my suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will enter.

But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into.

Through atoms of grey-blue air the sun struck at English fields and lit up marshes and pools, a white gull on a stake, the slow sail of shadows over blunt-headed woods and young corn and flowing hayfields. It beat on the orchard wall, and every pit and grain of the brick was silver pointed, purple, fiery as if soft to touch, as if touched it must melt into hot-baked grains of dust.

Ce qu'on attend de l'être avec qui l'on vit c'est qu'il vous maintienne au niveau le plus élevé de vous-même.

We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and returning to the profound darkness which it has lit up momentarily with a wandering light.

For among writers there are two kinds: there are the priests who take you by the hand and lead you straight up to the mystery; there are the laymen who imbed their doctrines in flesh and blood and make a complete model of the world without excluding the bad or laying stress upon the good.