Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

“But,” said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, “it won’t be fine.”

Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.

After all, what is the present? Half of it’s the past, and the better half, too, I should say

In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is better not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand.

Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting.

Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly filled them.

He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.

The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being

Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman.

Birds froze in midair and fell like stones to the ground.

I hate great men. The worship of greatness in the nineteenth century seems to me to explain the worthlessness of that generation.

“If it weren’t for the goats there’d be no music, my dear; music depends upon goats,”

The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.

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.

He fixed his eyes upon the road before him, not upon the world to come.

Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on.

Someone had blundered.