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"I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.But he never liked anyone who-our friends,' said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her.Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I've ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight."
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"I was alone with myself. And disgusting as I was it was better than being with somebody else, anybody else, all of them out there doing their pitiful little tricks and handsprings."

"All the things that people do in order to show that they don't need anybody... meanwhile, all they really want to do is say, "Please keep me." We all want to be kept. The problem is we are too afraid to let anyone know about it. What are these fragile things in our hearts that have so much fear of being broken?"

"And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart."

"Then the man smiled, and his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right cheek and down in the left.There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this. Many people have this nervous trick of a crooked smile, and in many it is even attractive. But in all Syme's circumstances, with the dark dawn and the deadly errand and the loneliness on the great dripping stones, there was something unnerving in it. There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic face. And there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly went wrong."

"There's still a little girl inside every grown woman who would love to be able to fall into the arms of her mother and cry her eyes out every now and then."

"On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it--that disgusts me."

"A heart in love is a thriller book of many stories."

"She paused and unexpectedly stroked her fingers down the feathers of his neck.He froze. She couldn't know how intimate that seemed, or how sensitive he was to her touch even through the sleek covering of eagle feathers. Pleasure at being petted ran down his spine.He should say something or step away. He did neither. Instead, ever so slightly, he leaned into her touch.It was wrong of him, but his wrong button seemed to be broken, and he didn't care."
Explore more quotes by Virginia Woolf


"It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others."


"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."


"The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers."


"I'll be blasted', he said, 'if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I'll write, from this day forward, to please myself."


"Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then-our friends are not able to finish their stories."


"And the supreme mystery was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?"
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