"Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."

"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."

"Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics."

"Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size."

"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."

"Why should a real chair be better than an imaginary elephant?"

"Septimus has been working too hard" - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought."

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

"This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears."

"I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction."

"You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one."

"It is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house, and clothing are mine forever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me."

"As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall."

"No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself."

"June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that."

"They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought, and no doubt if you are of a mystical tendency, consolation, and even explanation, shower down from the unbroken surface."

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."

"The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the wind, flashed into Rachel's mind, and she became profoundly excited at the thought of living."

"Pretty Stones."

"A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back."

"The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare."

"Pale, with dark hair, the one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here."

"Kind old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always go to a good man, they say."

"Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for."

"The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind."

"Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end."

"All extremes of feeling are allied with madness."

"Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"

"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."

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

"But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. 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."

"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."

"I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure."

"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."

"It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years? (asked Mr Ramsay ironically, staring at the hedge). What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare."

"But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles."

"Anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm."

"Like" and "like" and "like"-but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?"

"She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly's wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral."