Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Who shall blame the leader of the doomed expedition, if, having adventured to the uttermost, and used his strength wholly to the last ounce and fallen asleep not much caring if he wakes or not, he now perceives by some pricking in his toes that he lives, and does not on the whole object to live, but requires sympathy, and whisky, and some one to tell the story of his suffering to at once? Who shall blame him?

This fiddling and drifting and not impressing oneself upon anything – this always refraining and fingering and cutting things up into little jokes and facetiousness – that's what's so annihilating. Yet given little money, little looks, no special gift – what can one do? How could one battle? How could one leap on the back of life and wring its scruff?

it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another

Je ne crois pas à la valeur des existences séparées. Aucun de nous n'est complet en lui seul.

And then the shower fell, sudden, profuse. No one had seen the cloud coming. There it was, black, swollen, on top of them. Down it poured like all the people in the world weeping. Tears. Tears. Tears.

Mr John Langdon Davies warns women 'that when children cease to be altogether desirable, women cease to be altogether necessary'.

f anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.

She blazed. She kindled. Out of the night she burnt like a white star.

az én pedig a legkényelmesebb elnevezés bárki olyan személyre, aki valójában nincs.

This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it.

çünkü eÄŸer kad?n gerçeÄŸi söylemeye baÅŸlarsa aynadaki görüntü büzülür; erkek hayata uyum saÄŸlayamaz olur.

Ahora estoy suspendida en el vacío, sin vínculos. Estamos en la nada.

All was dim, yet intense too, as if the scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder by star or sword - the flash of some terrible reality leaping, as its way is, out of the heart of the spring. For youth -

How could one leap on the back of life and wring its scruff?

And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy. Anyhow there was not bitterness in her; none of that sense of moral virtue which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed practically everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment.

Richard has improved. You are right, said Sally. I shall go and talk to him. I shall say goodnight. What does the brain matter, said Lady Rosseter, getting up, compared with the heart? I will come, said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.

Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens.

I love and I hate. I desire one thing only.

It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the dark paths of the mind and enter the past, to visit books, to brush aside their branches and break off some fruit.

It was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many.

In a world which contains the present moment, why discriminate? Nothing should be named lest by so doing we change it.

Las nubes [...] se movían libremente, como si estuvieran destinadas a ir de oeste a este en una misión de la mayor importancia que jamás sería revelada.

Everything became softly amorphous, as if the china of the plate flowed and the steel of the knife were liquid. Meanwhile the concussion of the waves breaking fell with muffled thuds, like logs falling, on the shore.

This susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing no doubt. Still at his age he had, like a boy or a girl even, these alternations of mood; good days, bad days, for no reason whatever, happiness from a pretty face, downright misery at the sight of a frump. After