To the lighthouse Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Book: To the Lighthouse
Quotes of Book: To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf _ To the Lighthouse
How could any Lord have made this world?... there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for this world to commit... No happiness lasted.
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Virginia Woolf _ To the Lighthouse
Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience {she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles} but as a wedge of darkness.
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Virginia Woolf _ To the Lighthouse
He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.
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Virginia Woolf _ To the Lighthouse
Women made civilisation impossible with all their "charm " all their silliness.
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Virginia Woolf _ To the Lighthouse
{...} there was only the sound of the sea.
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Virginia Woolf _ To the Lighthouse
So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing
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Virginia Woolf _ To the Lighthouse
Pray heaven that the inside of my mind may not be exposed
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Virginia Woolf _ To the Lighthouse
It was some such feeling of completeness perhaps which, ten years ago, standing almost where she stood now, had made her say that she must be in love with the place. Love had a thousand shapes. There might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene, or meeting of people {all now gone and separate}, one of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays.
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Virginia Woolf _ To the Lighthouse
Why then did she do it? She looked at the canvas, lightly scored with running lines. It would be hung in the servants' bedrooms. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa. What was the good of doing it then, and she heard some voice saying she couldn't paint, saying she couldn't create, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them.
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Virginia Woolf _ To the Lighthouse
Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her-who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?
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Virginia Woolf _ To the Lighthouse
Yet she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreathes heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile and inhumane than love; yet it is also absolutely beautiful and necessary.
book-quote love life relationships
Virginia Woolf _ To the Lighthouse
His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at their feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet."
book-quote self-pity self-preservation