She seemed, anyhow, all light, glowing, like some bird or air ball that has flown in, attached itself for a moment to a bramble.
And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing.
To love makes one solitary, she thought.
She had some queer power of fiddling on one’s nerves, turning one’s nerves to fiddle-strings, yes.
If it were now to die ’twere now to be most happy.
The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?
Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?
I am growing up. I am losing my illusions perhaps to acquire new ones.
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
For he was quite happy, he assured her—perfectly happy, though he had never done a thing that they talked of; his whole life had been a failure.
Nothing exists outside us except a state of mind, he thinks; a desire for solace, for relief, for something outside these miserable pigmies, these feeble, these ugly, these craven men and women.
They had always this queer power of communicating without words.
Because all a person wants is feeling safe. Peace, that’s all I’m after.
For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house.
At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
As a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
For women live much more in the past than we do, he thought. They attach themselves to places; and their fathers—a woman’s always proud of her father.
But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.
The night is not a tumultuous black ocean in which you sink or sail as a star. As a matter of fact it was a wet November night.
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.