Leonard Woolf Quote

I get your moments when nothing seems to matter & I suppose that most of the time we, or I at any rate, are passively inert to happiness or unhappiness. I mean that we are so persistently automatic that most of the day is a trance. When I do think or feel, it is usually with rage or despair. Don’t you feel often or always that there is so little time to lose, & that we are losing it so fast. The Christians are right there, I feel, it wouldn’t matter if there were another life, if there were some chance of making up for the time we are cruelly forced to lose here. But to be hurrying to annihilation, & only to have lived for a hour or two out of twenty five years! And you say, as they all would say, ‘I feel it’s an episode’: you don’t seem to see that in a few minutes we shall be old & in a few hours dead, that it’s an episode between youth & life, & sterility & annihilation.

Leonard Woolf

I get your moments when nothing seems to matter & I suppose that most of the time we, or I at any rate, are passively inert to happiness or unhappiness. I mean that we are so persistently automatic that most of the day is a trance. When I do think or feel, it is usually with rage or despair. Don’t you feel often or always that there is so little time to lose, & that we are losing it so fast. The Christians are right there, I feel, it wouldn’t matter if there were another life, if there were some chance of making up for the time we are cruelly forced to lose here. But to be hurrying to annihilation, & only to have lived for a hour or two out of twenty five years! And you say, as they all would say, ‘I feel it’s an episode’: you don’t seem to see that in a few minutes we shall be old & in a few hours dead, that it’s an episode between youth & life, & sterility & annihilation.

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About Leonard Woolf

Leonard Sidney Woolf (; (1880-11-25)25 November 1880 – (1969-08-14)14 August 1969) was a British political theorist, author, publisher, and civil servant. He was married to author Virginia Woolf. As a member of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society, Woolf was an avid publisher of his own work and his wife's novels. A writer himself, Woolf created nineteen individual works and wrote six autobiographies. Leonard and Virginia did not have any children.