What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech-and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Picadilly.
The poet was forced to be passionate or bitter, unless indeed he chose to “hate women,” which meant more often than not that he was unattractive to them.
Hide me, I cry, protect me, for I am the youngest, the most naked of you all. Jinny rides like a gull on the wave... but I... am broken into separate pieces; I am no longer one.
The red carnation that stood in the vase on the table of the restaurant when we dined together with Percival is become a six-sided flower; made of six lives.
Her mind was like a wound exposed to dry in the air.
I knew he was angry by this token. When I read when he wrote about women I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself. When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument; and the reader cannot help thinking of the argument too. If he had written dispassionately about women had he used indisputable proofs to establish his argument and had shown no trace of wishing that the result would be one thing rather than another, one would not have been angry either.
It is the privilege of loneliness; in privacy one may do as one chooses. One might weep if no one saw.
I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky.
I should like to write four lines at a time, describing the same feeling, as a musician does; because it always seems to me that things are going on at so many different levels simultaneously.
It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the train window as they left Newhaven, it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
We are the words; we are the music...
He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth’s spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be.
But whatever effect discouragement and criticism had upon their writing – and I believe that they had a very great effect.
The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
And as it went on I set it against the background of that other talk, and as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one was the descendant, the legitimate heir of the other.
The tiger leapt, and the swallow dipped her wings in dark pools on the other side of the world.
I am suspended between life and death in an unfamiliar way.
I wonder why men always talk about politics?” Mary speculated. “I suppose, if we had votes, we should, too.” “I.
Nothing should be named lest by so doing we change it.
I can’t keep up with them, Peter Walsh thought, as they marched up Whitehall, and sure enough, on they marched, past him, past every one, in their steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline.