Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse Quotes
To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!
The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.
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.
So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball
How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.
How could any Lord have made this world?... there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for this world to commit... No happiness lasted.
so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again...
But when she looked at Prue tonight, she saw this was not now quite true of her. She was just beginning, just moving, just descending.
I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.
But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything.
. . . distant views seemed to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest.
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of treesand changing leaves.
They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love
When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.
It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven...
How then did it work out, this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?
They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did.
In the flailing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances
in this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow... (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house & grounds)