The age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours; nor their poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even. Everything was different. The weather itself, the heat and cold of summer and winter, was, we may believe, of another temper altogether.
The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace.
I have lived a thousand lives already. Every day I unbury – I dig up. I find relics of myself in the sand that women made thousands of years ago...
Why,” she asked, “if men write such rubbish as this, should our mothers have wasted their youth in bringing them into the world?
Should this be the end of the story? a kind of sigh? a last ripple of the wave? A trickle of water to some gutter where, burbling, it dies away?
What ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness.
But no; he did not like cabbages.
They would, she thought, going on again, however long they lived, come back to this night; this moon; this wind; this house: and to her too. It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven...
Somehow it’s dull and damp. I have been dull; I have missed you. I do miss you. I shall miss you. And if you don’t believe it, you’re a long-eared owl and ass. Lovely phrases?
Unhappiness is everywhere; just beyond the door; or stupidity, which is worse.
Even if one could state the value of any one gift at the moment, those values will change; in a century’s time very possibly they will have changed completely.
There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
The only prescription for me is to have a thousand interests.
If any human being, man, woman, dog, cat or half-crushed worm dares call me “middlebrow” I will take my pen and stab him, dead. Yours etc., Virginia Woolf.
But he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings?
Bradshaw said, ‘The people we are most fond of are not good for us when we are ill.
Nor could she talk as she did. But why wish to resemble her? Why? She despised Mrs. Dalloway from the bottom of her heart. She was not serious. She was not good. Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit. Yet Doris Kilman had been overcome. She had, as a matter of fact, very nearly burst into tears when Clarissa Dalloway laughed at her.
People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies, and it made her life a burden to her, for she so much preferred being left alone to do what she liked in the country, but they would compare her to lilies, and she had to go to parties, and London was so dreary compared with being alone in the country with her father and the dogs.
Yes, I miss you, I miss you. I dare not expatiate, because you will say I am not stark, and cannot feel the things dumb people feel. You know that is rather rotten rot, my dear Vita. After all, what is a lovely phrase? One that has mopped up as much Truth as it can hold.
Now he had surrendered; now other people must help him. People must be sent for. He gave in.