“Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“It is no use trying to sum people up.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this -- and much more than this is true -- why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us--why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.
Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them. ”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole--they see all sorts of things--they see themselves...”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us. To gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to have - positively - a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang - there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes up pretty often.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“Anyhow, whether undergraduate or shop boy, man or woman, it must come as a shock about the age of twenty—the world of the elderly—thrown up in such black outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors and Byron; the sea and the lighthouse; the sheep’s jaw with the yellow teeth in it; upon the obstinate irrepressible conviction which makes youth so intolerably disagreeable—“I am what I am, and intend to be it,” for which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for himself. The Plumers will try to prevent him from making it. Wells and Shaw and the serious sixpenny weeklies will sit on its head.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks—so it sounded.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“Kind old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always go to a good man, they say[.]”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“Let us consider letters - how they come at breakfast, and at night, with their yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by the postmark - for to see one's own envelope on another's table is to realize how soon deeds sever and become alien. Then at last the power of the mind to quit the body is manifest, and perhaps we fear or hate or wish annihilated this phantom of ourselves, lying on the table. Still, there are letters that merely say how dinner's at seven; others ordering coal; making appointments. The hand in them is scarcely perceptible, let alone the voice or the scowl. Ah, but when the post knocks and the letter comes always the miracle seems repeated - speech attempted. Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“I am what I am, and intend to be it,' for which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for himself.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.
Life would split asunder without them. "Come to tea, come to dinner, what's the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the capital is gay; the Russian dancers...." These are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe. And yet, and yet... when we go to dinner, when pressing finger-tips we hope to meet somewhere soon, a doubt insinuates itself; is this the way to spend our days? the rare, limited, so soon dealt out to us - drinking tea? dining out? And the notes accumulate. And the telephones ring. And everywhere we go wires and tubes surround us to carry the voices that try to penetrate before the last card is dealt. "Try to penetrate" for as we lift the cup, shake the hand, express the hope, something whispers, Is this all? Can I never know, share, be certain? Am I doomed all my days to write letters, send voices, which fall upon the tea-table, fade upon the passage, making appointments, while life dwindles, to come and dine? Yet letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps- who know? - we might talk by the way.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“For centuries the writing-desk has contained sheets fit precisely for the communication of friends. Masters of language, poets of long ages, have turned from the sheet that endures to the sheet that perishes, pushing aside the tea-tray, drawing close to the fire (for letters are written when the dark presses around a bright red cave), and addressed themselves the task of reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“Why, from the very windows, even in the dusk, you see a swelling run through the street, an aspiration, as with arms outstretched, eyes desiring, mouths agape. And then we peaceably subside. For if the exaltation lasted we should be blown like foam into the air. The stars would shine through us. We should go down the gale in salt drops- as sometimes happens. For the impetuous spirits will have none of this cradling. Never any swaying or aimlessly lolling for them. Never any making believe, or lying cosily, or genially supposing that one is much like another, fire warm, wine pleasant, extravagance a sin.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from Jacob's Room
“And that's when I snapped up my left hand and smashed him in the face with the hammer I'd grabbed.”
― Jennifer Estep, quote from Kiss of Frost
“The wife is always the last to know, right?”
― Shari Lapena, quote from The Couple Next Door
“The great human being is a finale; the great age — the Renaissance, for example — is a finale. The genius, in work and deed, is necessarily a squanderer: that he squanders himself, that is his greatness! The instinct of self-preservation is suspended, as it were: the overpowering pressure of outflowing forces forbids him any such care or caution. People call this 'self-sacrifice' and praise his 'heroism,' his indifference to his own well-being, his devotion to an idea, a great cause, a fatherland: without exception, misunderstandings. He flows out, he overflows, he uses himself up, he does not spare himself — and this is a calamitous involuntary fatality, no less than a river's flooding the land. Yet, because much is owed to such explosives, much has also been given them in return: for example, a kind of higher morality. After all, that is the way of human gratitude: it misunderstands its benefactors.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ
“He felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. He felt it rising in himself through time and darkness, rising through the centuries, and he knew that it rose in a line of men whose lives were chosen to sustain it, who would wander in the world, strangers from that violent country where the silence is never broken except to shout the truth. He felt it building from the blood of Abel to his own, rising and spreading in the night, a red-gold tree of fire ascended as if it would consume the darkness in one tremendous burst of flame. The boy’s breath went out to meet it. He knew that this was the fire that had encircled Daniel, that had raised Elijah from the earth, that had spoken to Moses and would in the instant speak to him. He threw himself to the ground and with his face against the dirt of the grave, he heard the command. GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY. The words were as silent as seed opening one at a time in his blood.”
― Flannery O'Connor, quote from The Violent Bear It Away
“Live well. Love deep. Tomorrow, we die.”
― C.L. Wilson, quote from Lady of Light and Shadows
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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