She was, on the contrary, inclined to be silent; she shrank from expressing herself even in talk, let alone in writing.
How many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after all?
The word ‘time’ split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable, words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time.
He was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A serious symptom, to be noted on the card.
Only human beings – what did THEY want?
The tower of Westminster Cathedral rose in front of her, the habitation of God. In the midst of the traffic, there was the habitation of God.
Chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons.
Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world of gloves and shoes and stuffs swaying up and down among the faint scents that come through chemists’ bottles down arcades of dress material over a floor of pseudo-marble.
Music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at once. With writing it seems to me there’s so much... scratching on the matchbox.
Thats what makes a view so sad, and so beautiful. It’ll be there when we’re not.
For Orlando’s taste was broad; he was no lover of garden flowers only; the wild and the weeds even had always a fascination for him.
Read a thousand books and your words will flow like a river.
When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other’s eyes that romance was killed?
Beneath us lie the lights of the herring fleet. The cliffs vanish. Rippling small, rippling grey, innumerable waves spread beneath us. I touch nothing. I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling me over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.
It is only that I want to be with you and not with anybody else – but you would get bored if I go on saying this, only it comes back and back till it drips of my pen.
To be loved by Susan would be to be impaled by a bird’s sharp beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door. Yet there are moments when I could wish to be speared by a beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door, positively, once and for all.
No one showed an instant’s suspicion that Orlando was not the Orlando they had known. If any doubt there was in the human mind the action of the deer and the dogs would have been enough to dispel it, for the dumb creatures, as is well known, are far better judges both of identity and character than we are.
Damn it, Madam, you are loveliness incarnate,” which was the truth.
How little, after all, one can tell anybody about one’s life! Here I sit; there you sit; both, I doubt not, chock-full of the most interesting experiences, ideas, emotions; yet how communicate?
Jacob! Jacob!” cried Bonamy, standing by the window. The leaves sank down again. “Such confusion everywhere!” exclaimed Betty Flanders, bursting open the bedroom door. Bonamy turned away from the window. “What am I to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?” She held out a pair of Jacob’s old shoes.