Virginia Woolf, The Waves Quotes

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.

I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.

And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.

I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.

Oh, to awake from dreaming!

I begin to be impatient of solitude - to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me.

I reach my object and say, Wander no more. All else is trial and make-believe.

I am not one and simple, but complex and many.

I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.

But when we sit together, close, ’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.

Up goes the rocket. Its golden grain falls, fertilising, upon the rich soil of my imagination.

I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful.

Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their stories.

Death is woven in with the violets, ” said Louis. “Death and again death.”)