Quotes from The Waves

“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“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.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“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.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“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. ”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy - to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour
to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my
world.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“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.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“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.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe
that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie
asleep.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“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.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated
faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the
features from faces. People might walk through me. And what is
this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found
myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar - forest trees or
the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel;
our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth
naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these
pavements are shells, bones and silence.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

“...But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful...”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves

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Popular quotes

“Battles are won en route, Shalhassan of Cathal though. A worthy thought: he raised his hand in a certain way, and a moment later Razeil galloped up, uneasy on a horse at speed, and the Supreme Lord of Cathal made him write it down.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from The Wandering Fire

“The word “coherence” literally means holding or sticking together, but it is usually used to refer to a system, an idea, or a worldview whose parts fit together in a consistent and efficient way. Coherent things work well: A coherent worldview can explain almost anything, while an incoherent worldview is hobbled by internal contradictions. …

Whenever a system can be analyzed at multiple levels, a special kind of coherence occurs when the levels mesh and mutually interlock. We saw this cross-level coherence in the analysis of personality: If your lower-level traits match up with your coping mechanisms, which in turn are consistent with your life story, your personality is well integrated and you can get on with the business of living. When these levels do not cohere, you are likely to be torn by internal contradictions and neurotic conflicts. You might need adversity to knock yourself into alignment. And if you do achieve coherence, the moment when things come together may be one of the most profound of your life. … Finding coherence across levels feels like enlightenment, and it is crucial for answering the question of purpose within life.

People are multilevel systems in another way: We are physical objects (bodies and brains) from which minds somehow emerge; and from our minds, somehow societies and cultures form. To understand ourselves fully we must study all three levels—physical, psychological, and sociocultural. There has long been a division of academic labor: Biologists studied the brain as a physical object, psychologists studied the mind, and sociologists and anthropologists studied the socially constructed environments within which minds develop and function. But a division of labor is productive only when the tasks are coherent—when all lines of work eventually combine to make something greater than the sum of its parts. For much of the twentieth century that didn’t happen — each field ignored the others and focused on its own questions. But nowadays cross-disciplinary work is flourishing, spreading out from the middle level (psychology) along bridges (or perhaps ladders) down to the physical level (for example, the field of cognitive neuroscience) and up to the sociocultural level (for example, cultural psychology). The sciences are linking up, generating cross-level coherence, and, like magic, big new ideas are beginning to emerge.

Here is one of the most profound ideas to come from the ongoing synthesis: People gain a sense of meaning when their lives cohere across the three levels of their existence.”
― Jonathan Haidt, quote from The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

“A building is a home if the people who inhabit it have memories and love and a place in the world. Otherwise, it is just a building, a shelter against the elements, and it can never be anything more.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from A Knight of the Word

“. . . this girl who seemed, increasingly, to be interested in learning to read everything except how human beings talked to one another.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from Out of Oz

“picture flash into my mind. I could just see Aunt”
― Janice Thompson, quote from Fools Rush In

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About BookQuoters

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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.