Deborah > Deborah's Quotes

“She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“To love makes one solitary.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks—all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“...she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Life stand still here.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Clarissa had a theory in those days - they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not 'here, here, here'; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoke to, some women in the street, some man behind a counter - even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps - perhaps.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“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.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable --- this interminable life.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood, - by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall”
― virginia woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Fear no more, says the heart...”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“She would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, far out to the sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Still, life had a way of adding day to day”
― virginia woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Nothing could be slow enough, nothing lasts too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Barton when they were all talking, to look at the sky; seen it between peoples shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep. She walked to the window.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“for women live much more in the past...they attach themselves to places;”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway