“Oh, I am in love with life!”

“I am not going to lie down and weep away a life of care.”

“There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.”

“What did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer.”

“Here am I shedding one of my life-skins and all they will say is, 'Bernard is spending ten days in Rome'.”

“For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not as simple as our friends would have us to meet our needs. Yet love is simple.”

“Leonard Woolf: If I didn't know you better I'd call this ingratitude. Virginia Woolf: I am ungrateful? You call ME ungrateful? My life has been stolen from me. I'm living in a town I have no wish to live in... I'm living a life I have no wish to live... How did this happen?”