But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and...

What she liked was simply life. “That’s what i did it for,” she said, speaking aloud to life… Could any man understand what she meant, either, about life? …But to go deeper, beneath what people...

But how are you going to get out, into the world of other people? That is your problem now, if I may hazard a guess — to find the right relationship, now that you know...

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[.]

Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a...

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, ‘The arrant feminist! She says...

It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true...

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of treesand changing leaves.

Nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched her own pools and let that couple look after themselves. She crouched low down and touched the smooth rubber-like sea anemones, who were stuck like lumps...

Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!

Beneath my eyes opens — a book; I see to the bottom; the heart — I see to the depths. I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither...

Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of...

… All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that...

Pretty Stones

To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.

now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply,...

Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still...

And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known byher shoes and her gloves.

To sit and contemplate – to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to...

Like” and “like” and “like”–but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough...

You send a girl to school in order to make friends – the right sort.

But beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty – it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life – froze it. One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion,...

the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string

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.

Chastity … has, even now, a religious importance in a woman’s life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day...

A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was...

There is a coherence in things, a stability; something… is immune from change and shines out… in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.

I am what I am, and intend to be it,” for which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for himself. The Plumers will try to prevent him from making...

He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all his own children, who, sprung from his...

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

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.

He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of...

Hail, happiness, then, and after happiness, hail not those dreams which bloat the sharp image as spotted mirrors do the face in a country-inn parlour; dreams which splinter the whole and tear us asunder and...

He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to...

If you drink the good wine of the noble countess, you have to entertain her less desirable friends.

These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of people had hung up their hats on those pegs. Even the flies, if you thought of it, had settled on other people’s noses....

The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme —...

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

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.

Possible then the professor inited a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of omen, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his superiority.

I am reading Henry James… and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.

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...