Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included."
42 Quotes
"What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on top of St. Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"I begin to be impatient of solitude - to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"I reach my object and say, Wander no more. All else is trial and make-believe."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"Either I shall find it, or I shall not find it. I examine my note-case. I look in all my pockets. These are the things that forever interrupt the process upon which I am eternally engaged of finding some perfect phrase that fits this moment exactly."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody - with whom? - with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I?"
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
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