“She felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through with it.”
More from Virginia Woolf
“I must open the little trap-door and let out these linked phrases in which I run together…”
“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
“They sang as if the edge of being were sharpened and must cut, must split the softness of…”
“I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrow-like here…”