Virginia Woolf quotes

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.

To love makes one solitary, she thought.

Still, life had a way of adding day to day.

Are we not all prisoners?

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.

No fact is too little to let it slip through one’s fingers and besides the interest of facts themselves, there is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.

I want to write a novel about Silence,” he said; “the things people don’t say.

— Spoken by a character · Chapter XVI

When I’m with artists 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, and then I go out into the streets and the first child I meet with its poor, hungry, dirty little face makes me turn round and say, ‘No, I can’t shut myself up—I won’t live in a world of my own.

— Spoken by a character · Chapter III

It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.