Vasilisa > Vasilisa's Quotes

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”
― Virginia Woolf

“All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street.”
― Virginia Woolf

“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

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.”
― Virginia Woolf

“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

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

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

“The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
― Virginia Woolf

“She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“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

“Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“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

“Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was however; there she was.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

“Not only after two or three centuries, but in a million years, life will still be as it was; life does not change, it remains for ever, following its own laws which do not concern us, or which, at any rate, you will never find out. Migrant birds, cranes for example, fly and fly, and whatever thoughts, high or low, enter their heads, they will still fly and not know why or where. They fly and will continue to fly, whatever philosophers come to life among them; they may philosophize as much as they like, only they will fly....”
― Anton Chekhov, The Three Sisters

“But then there's loneliness. However you might philosophise about it, loneliness is a terrible thing, my dear fellow… Although in reality, of course, it's absolutely of no importance!”
― Anton Chekhov, The Three Sisters

“MASHA. Just think, I am already beginning to forget her face. People will not remember us either. They will forget.

VERSHININ. Yes. They will forget. That is our fate, you can't do anything about it. The things which to us seem serious, significant, very important, - the time will come - they will be forgotten or they will seem of no consequence.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Three Sisters

“Riječ uvijek iznevjeri misao. A pogotovo iznevjeri osjećaj.”
― Vladan Desnica, Proljeća Ivana Galeba

“Volja je stvar jakih, želja stvar slabih.”
― Vladan Desnica, Proljeća Ivana Galeba

“Sve osnovne ljudske stvari izvlačimo iz djetinjstva.”
― Vladan Desnica, Proljeća Ivana Galeba