But suddenly it would come over her, if he were with me now what would he say? Some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James’s Park on a fine morning–indeed they did.
The idea of making a story about the Brownings’ dog came to her when she read the Browning letters; as she tells an American admirer who had written to her asking if he might buy the manuscript, “I am very glad to think that you share my sympathy for Flush.
Woolf was breaking new ground in the way she rendered consciousness and her understanding of human subjectivity.
For here again we come within range of that very interesting and obscure masculine complex which has had so much influence upon the woman’s movement; that deep-seated desire, not so much that she shall be inferior as that he shall be superior, which plants him wherever one looks, not only in front of the arts, but barring the way to politics too, even when the risk to himself seems infinitesimal and the suppliant humble and devoted.
What one would expect to find would be that rather later perhaps some great lady would take advantage of her comparative freedom and comfort to publish something with her name to it and risk being thought a monster.
To begin with, I ran my eye up and down the page. I am going to get the hang of her sentences first, I said, before I load my memory with blue eyes and brown and the relationship that there may be between Chloe and Roger. There will be time for that when I have decided whether she has a pen in her hand or a pickaxe.
If he’d had a boy he’d have said, Work, work. But he had his Elizabeth; he adored his Elizabeth.
Never did anybody look so sad.
Is it the lot of average human being, however, he asked himself, the criterion by which we judge the measure of civilization?
All human beings were laid asleep – prone, horizontal, dumb.
There in the trenches the change which Mr. Brewer desired when he advised football was produced instantly; he developed manliness; he was promoted; he drew the attention, indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by name. It was a case of two dogs playing on a hearth-rug;.
Eyes – wild, laughing, yet desperate –.
All was dim, yet intense too, as if the scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder by star or sword – the flash of some terrible reality leaping, as its way is, out of the heart of the spring. For youth -.
He saw a child dipping a can into a bright-green stream and asked if they drank that water. Yes, and washed in it too, for the landlord only allowed water to be turned on twice a week. Such sights were the more surprising, because one might come upon them in the most sedate and civilised quarters of London – “the most aristocratic parishes have their share.” Behind Miss Barrett’s bedroom, for instance, was one of the worst slums in London.
Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens.
That was the worst of growing up, she thought; they couldn’t share things as they used to share them.
I will write,” she had said, “what I enjoy writing.
Everything became softly amorphous, as if the china of the plate flowed and the steel of the knife were liquid. Meanwhile the concussion of the waves breaking fell with muffled thuds, like logs falling, on the shore.
I can’t imagine anything nicer than to sit out in the moonlight and listen to music –.
If one shuts one’s eyes and thinks of the novel as a whole, it would seem to be a creation owning a certain looking-glass likeness to life, though of course with simplifications and distortions innumerable.