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To the Lighthouse

“Radiant as [To the Lighthouse] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision o

(15 total)

Characters

Virginia Woolf (15)

“One's children so often gave one's own perceptions a little thrust forwards.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

Tagged: Family, kids, Children

“Let us enjoy what we do enjoy.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

Tagged: Go With Flow, Mind Your Own Business, You Do You

“It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

Tagged: Terror of Love, Intensity of Feeling, Feeling Too Much

“She alone spoke the truth; to her alone could he speak it. That was the source of her everlasting attraction for him, perhaps; she was a person to whom one could say what came into one's head.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“Mrs Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren't things spoilt then, Mrs Ramsay may have asked (it…”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“A light here required a shadow there.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“She had done the usual trick – been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr Bankes) were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. 'About life, about death; about Mrs Ramsay' – no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“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.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscription on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay's knee…”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“"Like a work of art," she repeated, looking from her canvas to the drawing-room steps and back again. She must rest for a moment. And, resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which transversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general question which was apt to p…”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

“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!”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

Tagged: Read In Your 20s

“For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, t…”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

Tagged: Solitude, Alone

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was o…”

— Virginia Woolf, amazon.com

Tagged: Life, Existential Crisis, Perspective