Septimus has been working too hard – that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.
I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?
The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.
She felt… how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is…at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away…
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?
I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.
Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.
By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.
I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.
About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease?
Death is woven in with the violets,” said Louis. “Death and again death.”)
Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure
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.
Mr Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.
The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be, and deserves fuller investigation.