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The Waves

One of Woolf’s most experimental novels, The Waves presents six characters in monologue - from morning until night, from childhood into old age - against a background of the sea. The result is a glorious chorus of voices that exists not to rema

(6 total)

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

Tagged: Solitude, Alone, Independence, Reflection, Introversion

“Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

Tagged: Pain

“The birds sang passionate songs addressed to one ear only and then stopped. Bubbling and chuckling they carried little bits of straw and twig to the dark knots in the higher branches of the trees. Gilt and purpled they perched in the garden, where cones of laburnum and purple shook down gold and lil…”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

Tagged: Song of Birds, Nature Descriptions

“I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

Tagged: Identity

“Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one’s friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to…”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

Tagged: Identity, Mixed

“Clear-cut and unequivocal am I too. Yet a vast inheritance of experience is packed in me. I have lived thousands of years. I am like a worm that has eaten its way through the wood of a very old oak beam. But now I am compact; now I am gathered together this fine morning.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

Tagged: Conservation