110 quotes
Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all.
Orlando: A Biography (1928)
A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Theirs, too, is the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
The Common Reader (1925)
I have lost friends, some by death [...] others through sheer inability to cross the street.
The Waves (1931)
If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?
A Room of One's Own (1929)
The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible.
The artist after all is a solitary being.
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)
Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said.
To the Lighthouse (1927)
No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.
Orlando: A Biography (1928)
When a subject is highly controversial — and any question about sex is that — one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.
A Room of One's Own (1929)
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
A Room of One's Own (1929)
Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings.
Orlando: A Biography (1928)
Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.
Orlando (1928)
Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
The Common Reader (1925)
For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it.
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like meteor and leave no dust.
Orlando: A Biography (1928)
Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.
Jacob's Room (1922)
Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.
Three Guineas (1938)
Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.
A Moment's Liberty (1990)