Violet wells > Violet's Quotes

“I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Yes, between your shoulders, over your heads, to a landscape,' said Rhoda, 'to a hollow where the many-backed steep hills come down like birds' wings folded. There, on the short, firm turf are bushes, dark leaved, and against their darkness I see a shape, white, but not of stone, moving, perhaps alive. It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Among the tortures and devestations of life is this
then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Whispering makes a narrow place narrower.”
― M.T. Anderson, Feed

“There's an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we're all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there's nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.”
― M.T. Anderson, Feed

“But our secrets do not keep us. They worry at us; they wear us away, from the inside out.”
― Hilary Mantel

“Each action contains its opposite. Each action contains the shadow-trace of the choice not made, the seeds of infinite variation. Each choice, once made, trips contingencies, alternatives; each choice breeds its own universe.”
― Hilary Mantel

“He thought of himself not as something heavy that left tracks behind it, but if anything, as a speck upon the surface of an earth too deeply asleep to notice the scratch of ant feet, the rasp of butterfly teeth, the tumbling of dust”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“...But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful...”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“They say that one must beat one's wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend.
How useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us. Yet how
painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed up,
become part of another.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Unless I can stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown down the eternal corridors for ever. What then can I touch? What brick, what stone? and so draw myself across the enormous gulf into my body safely?”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“But I will stretch my toes so that they touch the rail at the end of the bed; I will assure myself, touching the rail, of something hard. Now I cannot sink; cannot altogether fall through the thin sheet now. Now I spread my body on this frail mattress and hang suspended. I am above the earth now. I am no longer upright, to be knocked against and damaged. All is soft, and bending. Walls and cupboards whiten and bend their yellow squares on top of which a pale glass gleams. Out of me now my mind can pour.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Something irrevocable has happened. A circle has been cast on the
waters; a chain is imposed. We shall never flow freely again.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I’ve always liked the feeling of traveling light; there is something in me that wants to feel I could leave wherever I am, at any time, without any effort. The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of domestic life - a pot, a chair, a lamp - threatened to be the thing that sent me through the ice.”
― Nicole Krauss, Great House

“Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

“Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

“Enough of this. Does every conversation with you have to be the director's cut? Get out of the car.”
― Jonathan Lethem , Motherless Brooklyn

“Tourette's is just one big lifetime of tag, really. The world (or my brain---same thing) appoints me it, again and again. So I tag back. Can it do otherwise? If you've ever been it you know the answer.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn