[...] there was only the sound of the sea.
The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.
If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as th...
I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.
Buy for me from the King's own kennels, the finest elk hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring them back without delay. For, he murmured, scarcely above his breath as he turned to his books...
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowhip with other human beings as we take our place among them.
Well, we must wait for the future to show.
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their ma...
The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to it...
One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.
Now to sum it up,' said Bernard. 'Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we do not know each other (though I met you once I think, on board a ship going to Africa), we can talk freely. Th...
Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.
My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.
Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence
But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.
Life is a luminous halo a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning.
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.