Virginia Woolf

“Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.”

“For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“There was a serenity about him always that had the look of innocence, when, technically, the word was no longer applicable.”

“I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.”

“There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not. But, as I put down my glass I remember; I am engaged to be married. I am to dine with my friends tonight. I am Bernard.”

“We must admit that he had eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which were his temples.”

“There it was before her - life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.”

“Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.”

“I am rooted, but I flow.”

“Wind and storm colored July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed.”

“Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.”

“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”

“Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?”

“Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”

“Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.”

“It is the duty of the writer to describe.”

“My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.”

“For if it is rash to walk into a lion’s den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on top of St. Paul’s, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet. A poet is Atlantic and lion in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life—(and so on for six pages if you will, but the style is tedious and may well be dropped).”

“If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women...”

“His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely knew whether they held dreams or realities...and in five minutes she had filled the shell of the old dream with the flesh of life... ”

“It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.”

“Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.”

“I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.”

“What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.”

“some we know to be dead even though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through all the forms of life; other are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six”

“Untuk menikmati kebebasan kita harus mengendalikan diri sendiri.”

“It is no use trying to sum people up.”

“I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.”

“One must love everything.”

“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”

“I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them. ”

“Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.”

“Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?”

“Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.”

“It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”

“Marvelous are the innocent. ”

“When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.”

“Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.”

“Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.”

“What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?”

“De modo que não havia mesmo desculpa; não tinha absolutamente nada, exceto o pecado pelo qual a natureza humana o condenava à morte, o pecado de não sentir.”

“Como uma nuvem que atravessa o sol, o silêncio caiu sobre Londres, e caiu sobre o espírito. Todo esforço é findo. Pende o tempo, do mastro. Rígido, somente o esqueleto do hábito sustenta a forma humana. E onde não há nada, disse Peter Walsh a si mesmo; o sentimento escava-se, ôco, completamente ôco. Clarissa recusou-me, pensou. E ali ficou parado, a pensar: Clarissa recusou-me.”

“O amor torna a gente solitária, pensou.”

“Tinha a esquisita sensação de estar invisível; despercebida; desconhecida; de não ser mais casada, não ter mais filhos agora, apenas aquela espantosa e um tanto solene marcha com os demais, por Bond Street, ser esta Sra. Dalloway; nem mais Clarissa: Sra. Dalloway somente.”

“Não, agora nunca mais diria, de ninguém neste mundo, que eram isto ou aquilo. Sentia-se muito jovem; e, ao mesmo tempo, indizivelmente velha. Passava como uma navalha através de tudo; e ao mesmo tempo ficava de fora, olhando. Tinha a perpétua sensação, enquanto olhava os carros, de estar fora, longe e sozinha no meio do mar; sempre sentira que era muito, muito perigoso viver, por um só dia que fosse. Não que se julgasse inteligente, ou muito fora da comum. Nem podia saber como tinha atravessado a vida com os poucos dedos de conhecimento que lhe dera Fräulein Daniels. Não sabia nada; nem línguas, nem história; raramente lia um livro agora, exceto memórias, na cama; mas como a absorvia tudo aquilo, os carros passando; e não diria de Peter, não diria de si mesma: sou isto, sou aquilo.”

“By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream”

“The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

“it is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams”

“Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.”