I reflect now that the earth is only a pebble flicked off accidentally from the face of the sun and that there is no life anywhere in the abysses of space.
Without being able to decipher a word of the placard at the Gate, he had learnt his lesson – in Regent’s Park dogs must be led on chains.
I reach my object and say, Wander no more. All else is trial and make-believe.
It was not Orlando who spoke, but the spirit of the age. But whichever it was, nobody answered it.
Nothing happens here except that I write and write, and curse and burn.
I make it a rule to try everything,” she said. “Don’t you think it would be very annoying if you tasted ginger for the first time on your deathbed, and found you never liked anything so much? I should be so exceedingly annoyed that I think I should get well on that account alone.
I have felt that odd whirr of wings in the head.
I feel like Rimbaud, that I walked out of my madness, and away from my demon. I admitted to needing to be by mysef at periods. I am happy, but lazy and uninspired.
Genius needs freedom; it cannot flower if it is encumbered by fear, or rancor, or dependency, and without money freedom is impossible.
You have no one who has any sort of consideration for you. You have had patience and endurance till I am sick of the virtues, and what have they done for you? Half-killed you.
How resilient I am; and how fatalistic now; and how little I mind and how much; and how good my novel is; and how tired I am this morning; and how I like praise; and how full of ideas I am; and Tom and Stephen came to tea, and Ray and William dine; and I forgot to describe my interesting talk with Nessa about my criticizing her children; and I left out – I forget what.
People are so soon gone; let us catch them.
Married against their will, kept in one room, and to one occupation, how could a dramatist give a full or interesting or truthful account of them? Love was the only possible interpreter. 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.
She wore ear-rings, and a silver-green mermaid’s dress. Lolloping on the waves and braiding her tresses she seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed; turned, caught her scarf in some other woman’s dress, unhitched it, laughed, all with the most perfect ease and air of a creature floating in its element. But age had brushed her; even as a mermaid might behold in her glass the setting sun on some very clear evening over the waves.
The night and the stars, the dawn coming up, the barges swimming past, the sun setting... Ah dear,” she sighed, “well, the sunset is very lovely too. I sometimes think that poetry isn’t so much what we write as what we feel, Mr. Denham.
And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach. Mr.
She liked to be alone; she liked to be herself.
Orlando had become a woman. In every other aspect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been.
I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.
And were they happy together? Sally asked... ; for, she admitted, she knew nothing about them, only jumped to conclusions, as one does, for what can one know even of the people one lives with every day? she asked. Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life – one scratched on the wall.