The beauty of the world…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off...

They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in...

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?

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with...

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.

It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years? (asked Mr...

and even a tea party means apprehension, breakage

Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile...

He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted...

Fear no more,” said Clarissa. Fear no more the heat o’ the sun; for the shock of Lady Bruton asking Richard to lunch without her made the moment in which she had stood shiver, as...

For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill....

One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s...

(…) Sir Boris had fought and killed the Paynim; Sir Gawain, the Turk; Sir Miles, the Pole; Sir Andrew, the Frank; Sir Richard, the Austrian; Sir Jordan, the Frenchman; and Sir Herbert, the Spaniard. But...

And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values...

The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-conscious. We were made to act...

Like all feelings felt for oneself, Mrs. Ramsay thought, it made one sad. It was so inadequate, what one could give in return; and what Rose felt was quite out of proportion to anything she...

She put on her lace collar. She put on her new hat and he never noticed; and he was happy without her.

Here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?

He should be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship, he said. She would be just as proud of him if he didn’t, she answered. They disagreed always about this, but it did...

I don’t care much whether I ever get to know anything – but I want to work out something in figures – something that hasn’t got to do with human beings. I don’t want people...

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…

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.

It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others...

For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there mustbe between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and shehim.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

But language is wine upon his lips

For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now...

. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.

There is a code of behavior, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behooves the woman, whatever her own occupation may be, to go to the...

I should never be able to fulfill what is,I understand, the first duty of a lecturer-to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your...

But love – don’t we all talk a great deal of nonsense about it? What does one mean? … It’s only a story one makes up in one’s mind about another person, and one knows...

By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and...

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.

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.

Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.

The proper stuff of fiction” does not exist everything is the proper stuff of fiction every feeling every thought every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon no perception comes amiss. And if we...

That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your...

For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of – to think; well not even to think. To be...

James was sixteen, Cam seventeen, perhaps. She had looked round for someone who was not there, for Mrs. Ramsay, presumably. But there was only kind Mrs. Beckwith turning over her sketches under the lamp. Then,...

But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time,...

It has the permanent quality of literature.

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

Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was...

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)

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores...

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?