Quotes from Virginia Woolf

It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad!

Were there not trees and grass? he asked. Were these not the signals of freedom? Had he not always leapt forward directly Miss Mitford started on her walk? Why was he a prisoner here? He paused. Here, he observed, the flowers were massed far more thickly than at home; they stood, plant by plant, rigidly in narrow plots.

The great revelation had never come. Instead there were daily little miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark, here was one.

and even now, at this hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery;

So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.

The number of books in the world is infinite, and one is forced to glimpse and nod and move on after a moment of talk, a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime.

as perhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had no names and rivers wound they knew not where—such was her darkness...

For the reading of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life.

Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossiblity of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

So accurately does history repeat itself.

And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?

It is seldom that any one says anything about it, and to see the hordes crossing Waterloo Bridge to catch the non-stop to Surbiton one might think that reason impelled them. No, no. It is the drums and trumpets.

It passed through his mind that if he missed this chance of talking to Katharine, he would have to face an enraged ghost, when he was alone in his room again, demanding an explanation of his cowardly indecision. It was better, on the whole, to risk present discomfiture than to waste an evening bandying excuses and constructing impossible scenes with this uncompromising section of himself.

No se puede tener paz evitando la vida.

All this pitting of sex against sex . . . all this claiming of superiority and imparting of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is . . . of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.

Uno de ellos cantaba bajo la ventana del dormitorio; otro posado en la rama mas alta de las lilas; un tercero sobre el reborde del muro. Todos cantaban con una voz estridente, apasionada, vehemente, que parecía que iba a hacerles estallar el corazón, sin cuidarse de la áspera disonancia producida con el canto del pájaro vecino.

For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, 'This is what I have made of it! This!' And what had she made of it? What, indeed?

How could any Lord have made this world? she asked. With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor.

Bond Street la fascinaba; Bond Street muy de mañana en plena temporada; sus banderas ondeando; sus tiendas; sin excesos; sin resplandor; un rollo de tweed en la tienda donde su padre se había comprado los trajes durante cincuenta años; unas cuantas perlas; el salmón encima de un taco de hielo.

And so she went down and said to her husband, Why must they grow up and lose it all? Never will they be so happy again.

And all the time Ralph was well aware that the bulk of Katharine was not represented in his dreams at all, so that when he met her he was bewildered by the fact that she had nothing to do with his dream of her. When

Without being able to decipher a word of the placard at the Gate, he had learnt his lesson—in Regent's Park dogs must be led on chains.

o que podemos supor que fazem as mulheres quando buscam a companhia das outras?

One must, one always must, do something or other; it is not allowed one simply to enjoy oneself. Was it not for this reason that, some time ago, we fabricated the excuse, and invented the necessity of buying something? But what was it? Ah, we remember, it was a pencil. Let us go then and buy this pencil.