Life stand still here.

My belief is that if we live another century or so — I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as...

Those ruffians, the Gods, shan’t have it all their own way,– her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all...

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be...

What was she dreaming about, Mrs. Ramsay wondered, seeing her engrossed, as she stood there, with some thought of her own, so that she had to repeat the message twice––ask Mildred if Andrew, Miss Doyle,...

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order

In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only...

Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.

When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better–her husband; money; his books. But for her own part she...

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...

It was awful, he cried, awful, awful!Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

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...

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think...

But this was suddenly interrupted, William Bankes remembered (and this must refer to some actual incident), by a hen, straddling her wings out in protection of a covey of little chicks, upon which Ramsay, stopping,...

alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know

She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and...

This susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing, no doubt. Still at his age he had, like a boy or a girl even, these alternations of mood; good days, bad days, for no reason whatever,...

He would argue with her about killing themselves; and explain how wicked people were; how he could see them making up lies as they passed in the street. He knew all their thoughts, he said;...

Poor little place,’ he murmured with a sigh.She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usual. All this phrase-making...

As summer neared, as the evening lengthened there came to the wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the strangest kind- of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind,...

Shakespeare is getting flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him, as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the reach of scribbling fingers. With all this buzz of criticism about, one may...

The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.

When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?

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

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

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

The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process.

Well, we must wait for the future to show.

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

Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain-top is covered in mist, knows that he must lay himself down and die before morning...

Y mientras gesticulas, con tu capa, tu bastón, intento exponer ante ti un secreto que nadie conoce: estoy pidiéndote (en pie detrás de ti) que tomes mi vida entre tus manos y me digas si...

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour–landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair!...

Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was...

All raw, uncooked, protesting.”(on Aldous Huxley)

First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it’s ripe; it will be exquisite by September.

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.

…it struck her, this was tragedy– not palls, dust, and the shroud; but children coerced, their spirits subdued.

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that...

How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny...

The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to...

I burn, I shiver, out of this sun, into this shadow.

Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that...

His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at their feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her...

Roses,” she thought sardonically, “All trash, m’dear.

Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes...

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in...