30 phrases by Virginia Woolf to delve into English literature

The older you get, the more you like indecency.

Will he have the finger of death to rest from time to time on the turmoil of life to keep it from tearing us apart? Is this our condition that we must receive death daily, in small doses, in order to continue in the business of life?

For the philosopher is right when he says that between happiness and melancholy there is no thickness greater than that of a knife blade.

Thought and life are like polar opposites.

The truth is, I always like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their integrity. I like their anonymity.

Lock the libraries if you like; but there are no gates, no locks, no padlocks with which you can lock the freedom of my thought.

Was I too happy for my soul’s sake? And does part of my discontent come from this feeling?

She had a permanent feeling, watching the taxis, of being far, far, far out to sea and alone; she was always invaded by this feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live, even for a day.

We are nauseated just looking at trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of newspaper ink.

Our life is an uncertainty. A blind man who reels in the void in search of a better world whose existence is only an assumption.

This soul, or the life within us, does not match the life outside of us at all.

As soon as we begin to speak, to act with affectation, to dictate laws, we perish. We live, then, for others, not for ourselves.

It’s much harder to kill a ghost than a reality.

However, the sun was hot. However, we end up overcoming everything. However, always in life one day comes after another.

Death was a challenge. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the center that, mystically, eluded; proximity separated; the rapture was fading; we were alone. There was an embrace in death.

I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the rivers. To me, you are all there is, the reality of all.

The beauty of the world, which is too soon to perish, has two extremes, one of joy, the other of anguish, splitting the heart.

Each one has its own past closed in on itself, like a book you know by heart, a book whose friends can only read the title of.

You don’t find peace by avoiding life.

The eyes of others are prisons; your thoughts our cells.

But no, Septimus would not kill himself; and she couldn’t talk to anyone. “Septimus has been working too hard” was the only thing she could say to her own mother. Love makes you lonely, she thought.

As on a summer day, waves form, unbalance and break; they form and burst; and the whole world seems to be saying ‘that’s all’, more and more gravely, until even the heart beating in the body lying on the beach in the sun also says: that’s all.

No need to hurry. There is no need to shine. It doesn’t have to be anyone but yourself.

It is not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and hurry to the buses.

In idleness, in dreams, this truth that was submerged sometimes emerges.

Now I’m going to wrap my anguish inside my handkerchief. I’ll knead it into a tight ball.

Tuesday, comes after Monday; Wednesday after Tuesday. Every day spreads the same ripple. The being grows in rings, like a tree, there are leaves falling.