Quotes About Progress

In the 18th century we knew how everything was done, but here I rise through the air, I listen to voices in America, I see men flying- but how is it done? I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.

She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.

Women's rights, that antediluvian topic.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

To upset everything every 3 or 4 years is my notion of a happy life.

La historia de la oposición masculina a la emancipación de las mujeres quizá sea más interesante que la propia historia de la emancipación

Feminism', we have had to destroy.

Shakespeare could not have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural saveragery of the tongue. 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.

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

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.

There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; & that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.' (26 July 1922)

We were full of experiments and reforms, we were going to do without table napkins. Everything was going to be new, everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial.

That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.

Still the future of civilization lies, he thought, in the hands of young men like that; of young men such as he was, thirty years ago; with their love of abstract principles; getting books sent out to them all the way from London to a peak in the Himalayas; reading science; reading philosophy. The future lies in the hands of young men like that, he thought.

Think of me, the uneducated child reading books in my room at 22 Hyde Park Gate -- now advanced to this glory... Yes; all that reading, I say, has borne this odd fruit. And I am pleased.

I can't keep up with them, Peter Walsh thought, as they marched up Whitehall, and sure enough, on they marched, past him, past every one, in their steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline.

Todo puede suceder cuando la feminidad ya no sea una ocupación protegida.

We stumble up—we stumble on.

Time flaps on the mast--

her generation of novelists, including Forster, Lawrence, and Joyce, from their Edwardian predecessors, Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells.

Mesmo assim, o sol era quente. Mesmo assim, a gente superava as coisas. Mesmo assim, a vida arranjava um jeito de somar um dia ao outro.

For a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

La historia de la oposición de los hombres a la emancipación de las mujeres es más interesante quizá que el relato de la emancipación misma.

One of these days d'you think you'll be able to see things at the end of the telephone? Peggy said, getting up.