For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of – to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.
Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place?
It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.
Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.
It’s the writing, not the being read, that excites me. Joy is in the doing.
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned – in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
The truer the facts the better the fiction.
Once she knows how to read there’s only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.
For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.
Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.
Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.
He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.
The mind is the most capricious of insects – flitting, fluttering.
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 its whiteness.
I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.
Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.
Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.
Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.