Quotes About Contemplation

Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here's death, she thought.

Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.

Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

Alone, over my dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories.

Here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?

He would look over the edge of the sofa down into the sea.

Here, she felt, putting the spoon down, was the still space that lies about the heart of things, where one could move or rest...

For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn?

For the whole world seemed to have dissolved in this early morning hour into a pool of thought, a deep basin of reality, and one could almost fancy that had Mr. Carmichael spoken, for instance, a little tear would have rent the surface pool. And then? Something would emerge. A hand would be shoved up, a blade would be flashed. It was nonsense of course.

Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with these silences.

But what after all, is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the waves. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness.

She liked to be alone; she liked to be herself

There it was, all round them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity.

thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

I am alone, said Orlando, aloud since there was no one to hear.

At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.

Queer, I mused, to see what we were thinking five years ago.

I can't imagine anything nicer than to sit out in the moonlight and listen to music—

Swelling, perpetually augmented, there is a vast accumulation of unrecorded matter in my head.

Mrs. Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door to, and she heard the swish of Lucy's skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions.

To be silent; to be alone. 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.

Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall... Here is something definite, something real. thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is proof of some existence other than ours.

Her pleasant brown eyes resembled Ralph's, save in expression, for whereas he seemed to look straightly and keenly at one object, she appeared to be in the habit of considering everything from many different points of view.

White and distant, absorbed in itself, endlessly the sky covers and uncovers, moves and remains.