Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room Quotes

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.

Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.

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?

It is no use trying to sum people up.

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

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

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.

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.]

anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

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?

The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks—so it sounded.

But language is wine upon his lips

Kind old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always go to a good man, they say[.]

He is precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the rest of his life.

No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.