The Waves Quotes
"The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another."
"I see a globe, hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill."
"A shadow falls on the path, like an elbow bent."
"Stones are cold to my feet. I feel each one, round or pointed, separately."
"Now the cock crows like a spurt of hard, red water in the white tide."
"Birds are singing up and down and in and out all round us."
"The dining-room window is dark blue now, and the air ripples above the chimneys."
"I love, and I hate. I desire one thing only."
"I burn, I shiver, out of this sun, into this shadow."
"I saw her kiss him. I looked between the leaves and saw her."
"I will not conjugate the verb until Bernard has said it."
"Now Miss Hudson has shut the book. Now the terror is beginning."
"Every hour something new is unburied in the great bran pie."
"Underneath, and, at the moment when I am most disparate, I am also integrated."
"In a world which contains the present moment, why discriminate?"
"I feel the whole cruelty and indifference of the world in them."
"I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November."
"The circle is destroyed. We are thrown asunder."
"Too soon the moment of ravenous identity is over, and the appetite for happiness, and happiness, and still more happiness is glutted."
"Why, I ask (whispering discreetly), do women dine alone together there?"
"Happiness is in it, and the quiet of ordinary things."
"We are not slaves bound to suffer incessantly unrecorded petty blows on our bent backs."
"Now the agony begins; now the horror has seized me with its fangs."
"Life passes; the clouds change perpetually over our houses."
"I am sick of prettiness; I am sick of privacy."
"I ride rough waters and shall sink with no one to save me."
"Yet if they want violence, I have seen death and murder and suicide all in one room."
"I have tried to draw from the living flesh the stone lodged at the centre."
"Now I climb this Spanish hill; and I will suppose that this mule-back is my bed and that I lie dying."
"When someone comes in at breakfast, even the embroidered fruit on my curtain swells so that parrots can peck it."
"The thin, skimmed milk of early morning turns opal, blue, rose."
"Each day is dangerous. Smooth on the surface, we are all bone beneath like snakes coiling."
"Suppose we read The Times; suppose we argue. It is an experience."
"Let solidity be destroyed. Let us have no possessions."
"Each sight is an arabesque scrawled suddenly to illustrate some hazard and marvel of intimacy."
"I am clouded and bruised with the print of minds and faces and things so subtle that they have smell, colour, texture, substance, but no name."
"But to myself I am immeasurable; a net whose fibres pass imperceptibly beneath the world."
"I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither."
"Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it."
"We are not always aware by any means; we breathe, eat, sleep automatically."
"Life is pleasant. Life is good. The mere process of life is satisfactory."
"What is unescapable in our lot; death; the knowledge of limitations."
"I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am."
"Our flame, the will-o'-the-wisp that dances in a few eyes, is soon to be blown out and all will fade."
"It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams."
"Our friends—how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known."
"Life is pleasant; life is tolerable. Tuesday follows Monday; then comes Wednesday."
"I could not recover myself from that dissipation."
"Was this, then, this streaming away mixed with Susan, Jinny, Neville, Rhoda, Louis, a sort of death? A new assembly of elements?"
"Must I forever beat my spoon on the table-cloth? Shall I not, too, consent?"
"So we are cut and laid in swaths, I said; so we lie side by side on the damp meadows, withered branches and flowering."
"We have renounced our station and lie now flat, withered and how soon forgotten!"
"For I am no mystic; something always plucks at me—curiosity, envy, admiration, interest in hairdressers and the like bring me to the surface."
"This is not one life; nor do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny, or Rhoda—so strange is the contact of one with another."
"Heaven be praised for solitude! Let me be alone."
"How much better is silence; the coffee-cup, the table."
"Let me sit here forever with bare things, this coffee-cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself."
"Dawn is some sort of whitening of the sky; some sort of renewal."
"It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India."