110 quotes
We have dined well. The fish, the veal cutlets, the wine have blunted the sharp tooth of egotism. Anxiety is at rest.
The Waves (1931)
I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.
Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it — the poets and novelists — can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does no exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma — a mirage.
Orlando: A Biography (1928)
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
In short, if newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.
Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
Moments of Being (1939)
I bought the blue paper book [Ulysses], & read it here one summer I think with spasms of wonder, of discovery, & then again with long lapses of immense boredom.
The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property; (2) that she was a woman which amounts to much the same thing ...
Orlando: A Biography (1928)
‘The flower,’ said Bernard, ‘the red carnation that stood in the vase on the table of the restaurant when we dined together with Percival, is become a six-sided flower; made of six lives.’
The Waves (1931)
The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman's grace.
Orlando: A Biography (1928)
Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
Orlando: A Biography (1928)
For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not simple as our friends would have us to meet their needs. Yet love is simple.
The Waves (1931)
Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.
The Waves (1931)
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
Books are the mirrors of the soul.
Between the Acts (1941)
She alone spoke the truth; to her alone could he speak it. That was the source of her everlasting attraction for him, perhaps; she was a person to whom one could say what came into one's head.
To the Lighthouse (1927)
Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush were the whole of it.
Orlando: A Biography (1928)
Words rose above the intolerably laden dumb oxen plodding through the mud. Words without meaning - wonderful words.
Between the Acts (1941)
The flowers flashed before they faded. She watched them flash.
Between the Acts (1941)