"Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order."

"Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry."

"Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe."

"The sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water."

"But love...it's only an illusion. A story one makes up in one's mind about another person. And one knows all the time it isn't true. Of course one knows why one's always taking care not to destroy the illusion."

"How could one leap on the back of life and wring its scruff?"

"The voice of protest is the voice of another and an ancient civilization which seems to have bred in us the instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and understand."

"Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another."

"The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional."

"Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own."

"It seems comfortable to sink down on a sofa in a corner, to look, to listen. Then it happens that two figures standing with their backs against the window appear against the branches of a spreading tree. With a shock of emotion one feels 'There are figures without features robed in beauty'. In the pause that follows while the ripples spread, the girl to whom one should be talking says to herself, 'He is old'. But she is wrong. It is not age; it is that a drop has fallen; another drop. Time has given the arrangement another shake. Out we creep from the arch of the currant leaves, out into a wider world. The true order of things - this is our perpetual illusion - is now apparent. Thus in a moment, in a drawing-room, our life adjusts itself to the majestic march of day across the sky."

"The compensation of growing old...was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained - at last! - the power which adds the supreme flavor to existence, - the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light."

"To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!"

"Roses," she thought sardonically, "All trash, m'dear."

"James was sixteen, Cam seventeen, perhaps. She had looked round for someone who was not there, for Mrs. Ramsay, presumably. But there was only kind Mrs. Beckwith turning over her sketches under the lamp. Then, being tired, her mind still rising and falling with the sea, the taste and smell that places have after long absence possessing her, the candles wavering in her eyes, she had lost herself and gone under. It was a wonderful night, starlit; the waves sounded as they went upstairs; the moon surprised them, enormous, pale, as they passed the staircase window. She had slept at once."

"Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?"

"For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said."

"To sit and contemplate - to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are."

"So that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again..."

"One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly."

"If you drink the good wine of the noble countess, you have to entertain her less desirable friends."

"She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!"

"But when she looked at Prue tonight, she saw this was not now quite true of her. She was just beginning, just moving, just descending."

"Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man's soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory, away the aeroplane shot."

"About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone."

"She sighed, she snored, not that she was asleep, only drowsy and heavy, drowsy and heavy, like a field of clover in the sunshine this hot July day, with the bees going round and about and the yellow butterflies."

"Human relations, at least between the sexes, were carried on as relations between countries are now - with ambassadors, and treaties. The parties concerned met on the great occasion of the proposal. If this were refused, a state of war was declared."

"In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether they were beggars or people of substance."

"Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone."

"Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth."

"And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of treesand changing leaves."

"Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded."

"When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly."

"My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness."

"Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life?"

"She seemed a compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine ..."

"I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement."

"I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun."

"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."

"Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?"

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

"But it would have been a surprise, not only to Katherine herself, if some magic watch could have taken count of the moments spent in an entirely different occupation from her ostensible one.Sitting with faded papers before her, she took part in a series of scenes such as the taming of wild ponies upon the American prairies, or the conduct of a vast ship in a hurricane round a black promontory of rock, or in others more peaceful, but marked by her complete emancipation from her present surroundings and, needless to say, her surprising ability in her new vocation."

"I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours."

"We became six people at a table in Hampton Court. We rose and walked together down the avenue. In the thin, the unreal twilight, fitfully like the echo of voices laughing down some alley, geniality returned to me and flesh. Against the gateway, against some cedar tree I saw blaze bright, Neville, Jinny, Rhoda, Louis, Susan and myself, our life, our identity. Still King William seemed an unreal monarch and his crown mere tinsel. But we, against the brick, against the branches, we six, out of how many million millions, for one moment out of what measureless abundance of past time and time to come, burnt there triumphant. The moment was all; the moment was enough."

"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."

"I burn, I shiver, out of this sun, into this shadow."

"What she liked was simply life. "That's what i did it for," she said, speaking aloud to life... Could any man understand what she meant, either, about life? But to go deeper, beneath what people said, and these judgments, how superficial, how fragmentary, they are. In her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? It was an offering, it was her gift."

"The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver."

"Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning."

"But we-' she glanced at him as if to ascertain his position, 'we see each other only now and then-''Like lights in a storm-''In the midst of a hurricane,' she concluded, as the window shook beneath the pressure of the wind."