top of page

"Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waves swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Sorrow quotes
Explore more quotes by Virginia Woolf


"The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own."


"There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby."


"The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second."


"The proper stuff of fiction does not exist everything is the proper stuff of fiction every feeling every thought every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her as well as honour and love her for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured."


"Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned-in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?"


"In reading we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river."


"Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards, their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble, the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."
bottom of page