Virginia Woolf

One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.

I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.

Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.

Love ought to stop on both sides, don’t you think, simultaneously?’ He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake the sleepers. ‘But it won’t - that’s the devil,’ he added in the same undertone.

She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust.

It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.

But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.

Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.

There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death.

I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.

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.

They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the teashop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him- he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily…he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then- that he could not feel.

Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waves swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.

How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?

Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.

It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.