The Waves - Virginia Woolf

"All here is false; all is meretricious."

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.” 

“I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.” 

"The words of authority are corrupted by those who speak them. I gibe and mock at this sad religion, at these tremulous, grief stricken figures advancing, cadaverous and wounded, down a white road shadowed by fig tees where boys sprawl in the dust-naked boys..."

"Meaning has gone. The clock ticks. The two hands are convoys marching through a desert. The black bars on the clock face are green oases. The long hand has marched ahead to find water. The other painfully stumbles among hot stones in the desert. It will die in the desert. The kitchen door slams. Wild dogs bark far away. Look, the loop of the figure is beginning to fill with time; it holds the world in it. I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in it, and I myself am outside the loop; which I now join-so-and seal up, and make entire."

"Let us be trivial, let us be intimate."

"I am the best scholar in the school. But when darkness comes I out off this unenviable body-my large nose, my thin lips, my colonial accent-and inhabit space. I am then Virgil's companion, and Plato's."

"I go vaguely, to make money vaguely."

"That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection..."

"One breaks off from his station under the glass cabinet. He approaches. He makes toward me. This is the most exciting moment I have ever known. I flutter. I ripple. I stream like a plant in the river, flowing this way, flowing that way, but rooted, so that he may come to me. 'Come,' I say, 'come.' Pale, with dark hair the one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch as fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here; he stand at my side."

"We insist, it seems, on living."

"The growl of traffic might be an uproar-forest trees or the roar if wild beasts. Time has whiz zed back an inch or two on it's wheel; our short progress has been canceled."

"To be loved by Susan would be to be impaled by a bird's sharp beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door."

"Death is woven in with the violets."

"...the frail pink-and-white card houses of the southern village..."

"But I never rise at dawn and see the purple drops in the cabbage leaves; the red drops in the roses. I do not watch the setter nose in a circle or lie at night watching the leaves hide the stars move and the leaves hang still. The butcher calls; the milk has to be stood under a shade lest it should sour."

"Here it is November; the poor hold out matchboxes in wind-bitten fingers."

"The evening sun, whose heat had gone out of it and whose burning spot of intensity had been diffused, made chairs and tables mellowed and inlaid them with lozenges of brown and yellow."

"I am wedged into my place in the puzzle."

"All this little affair of "being" is over."

"Though my mother still knits white socks for me and hems pinafores and I am a child, I love and I hate." 

"Those are yellow words, those are fiery words."

“But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.” 

"Rich and heavy sensations form on the roof of my mouth."

“I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely.”

"He was blind as a bull, and she swooned in anguish, only little veins streaking her white cheeks red."

"Everybody seems to be doing things for this moment only; and never again. Never again. The urgency of it all is fearful. Everybody knows I am going to school, going to school for the first time. 'That boy is going to school for the first time they,' says the housemaid, cleaning the steps. I must not cry. I must behold them indifferently."

“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”

“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.” 

“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.” 

“When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.” 

“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next."

“For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.” 

“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”

“I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.” 

“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.” 

“To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.” 

“But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.” 

"I have to bang my hand against some hard door to call myself back to the body."

“There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.”

“Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.”