How strange to feel the line that is spun from us lengthening its fine filament across the misty spaces of the intervening world.
At any rate, where books are concerned, it is notoriously difficult to fix labels of merit in such a way that they do not come off.
And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed, one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.
She had never seen the sense of cutting people up, as Clarissa Dalloway did – cutting them up and sticking them together again; not at any rate when one was sixty-two.
Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer!
To know the truth – to accept without bitterness.
Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss.
She lives in dreams, alone.
With equal complacence she saw his misery, condoned his meanness, and acquiesced in his torture.
With the twelfth stroke of midnight, the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the city. All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The eighteenth century was over; the nineteenth century had begun.
No, delightful as the pastime of measuring be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver.
She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.
Then he looked at a car. It was odd how soon one got used to cars without horses, he thought. They used to look ridiculous.
Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her fore-runners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.
Ma Peter – non importa quanto fosse bella la giornata, e gli alberi e l’erba, e la fanciulla vestita di rosa – Peter non vedeva mai nulla. Se lei glielo chiedeva, si metteva gli occhiali; guardava. Ma era lo stato del mondo che gli interessava: Wagner, la poesia di Pope, il carattere della gente, e i difetti dell’anima di lei.
First she starved herself of love, which meant also life; then of poetry in deference to what she thought her religion demanded.
And as she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael was there or not, her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modelled it with greens and blues.
I raged, and woke to hear the rain.
But if one day you do not come after breakfast, if one day I see you in some looking-glass perhaps looking after another, if the telephone buzzes and buzzes in your empty room, I shall then, after unspeakable anguish, I shall then – for there is no end to the folly of the human heart – seek another, find another, you.