To the Lighthouse quotes

… and pure, frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs.

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

Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr.

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

Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it.

Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere presence;

What he said was true. It was always true.

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

, least of all of his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr.

It was Andrew’s doing. She asked him what his father’s books were about. “Subject and object and the nature of reality,” Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant.

“Think of a kitchen table then,” he told her, “when you’re not there.”

So she always saw, when she thought of Mr. Ramsay’s work, a scrubbed kitchen table. It lodged now in the fork of a pear tree, for they had reached the orchard.

“It’s too short,” she said, “ever so much too short.”

Never did anybody look so sad.

Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.

Someone had blundered.

Starting from her musing she gave meaning to words which she had held meaningless in her mind for a long stretch of time.

Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q.

He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate.

If Q then is Q—R—Here he knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the ram’s horn which made the handle of the urn, and proceeded. “Then R …” He braced himself. He clenched himself.

… divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q.

He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q.

Here, stopping for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far far away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely defenceless against a doom which he perceived, …

They needed his protection; he gave it them. But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance.

Z is only reached once by one man in a generation.

Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate.

He wanted sympathy.

He was a failure, he said.

Mrs. Ramsay flashed her needles. Mr. Ramsay repeated, never taking his eyes from her face, that he was a failure. She blew the words back at him. “Charles Tansley …” she said. But he must have more than that.

Yes, Mr. Bankes said, watching him go.

It was a thousand pities.

(Lily had said something about his frightening her—he changed from one mood to another so suddenly.) Yes, said Mr. Bankes, it was a thousand pities that Ramsay could not behave a little more like other people. (For he liked Lily Briscoe;

Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s knee.

Nothing happened. Nothing! Nothing! as she leant her head against Mrs. Ramsay’s knee.

And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom were stored in Mrs. Ramsay’s heart. How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?

It should be made illegal. A model dairy and a hospital up here—those two things she would have liked to do, herself. But how? With all these children? When they were older, then perhaps she would have time; when they were all at school.

Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either.

These two she would have liked to keep forever just as they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters. Nothing made up for the loss.

They had all their little treasures. … And so she went down and said to her husband,

Why must they grow up and lose it all?

Never will they be so happy again. And he was angry. Why take such a gloomy view of life? he said. It is not sensible. For it was odd; and she believed it to be true;

And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish.

Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.

Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it.

and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke.

Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at⁠—that light for example.

And it would lift up on it some little phrase or other which had been lying in her mind like that—“Children don’t forget, children don’t forget”—which she would repeat and begin adding to it, It will end, It will end, she said.

What brought her to say that: “We are in the hands of the Lord?” she wondered. The insincerity slipping in among the truths roused her, annoyed her. She returned to her knitting again.

How could any Lord have made this world? she asked.

With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that.

She returned to her knitting again. How could any Lord have made this world? she asked. With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor.

There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that.

She knitted with firm composure, slightly pursing her lips and, without being aware of it, so stiffened and composed the lines of her face in a habit of sternness that when her husband passed, though he was chuckling at the thought that Hume, the philosopher, …

They showed he did not damn the poor little universe entirely, for on an evening like this, he thought, looking at the land dwindling away, the little island seemed pathetically small, half swallowed up in the sea.

“Poor little place,” he murmured with a sigh.

She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usual.

Jasper and Rose said that Mildred wanted to know whether she should wait dinner.

“Not for the Queen of England,” said Mrs. Ramsay emphatically.

“Not for the Empress of Mexico,” she added, laughing at Jasper; for he shared his mother’s vice: he, too, exaggerated.

He was a disreputable old bird, with half his wing feathers missing. He was like some seedy old gentleman in a top hat she had seen playing the horn in front of a public house.

“Look!” she said, laughing. They were actually fighting. Joseph and Mary were fighting.

Anyhow they all went up again, and the air was shoved aside by their black wings and cut into exquisite scimitar shapes.

But what have I done with my life? thought Mrs. Ramsay, taking her place at the head of the table, and looking at all the plates making white circles on it.

“William, sit by me,” she said. “Lily,” she said, wearily, “over there.” They had that—Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle—she, only this—an infinitely long table and plates and knives. At the far end, was her husband, sitting down, all in a heap, frowning. What at?

“Oh, Mr. Tansley,” she said, “do take me to the Lighthouse with you. I should so love it.”

She was telling lies he could see.

She was saying what she did not mean to annoy him, for some reason. She was laughing at him. He was in his old flannel trousers. He had no others. He felt very rough and isolated and lonely.

Ramsay’s gratitude (for Mrs. Ramsay was free now to talk for a moment herself), ah, she thought, but what haven’t I paid to get it for you? She had not been sincere.

She had done the usual trick⁠—been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her.

Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr. Bankes) were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere.

She had done the usual trick—been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her.

Human relations were all like that, she thought

, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr. Bankes) were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere.

and he laughed. He meant yes or no—either perhaps. But it was not his meaning—it was the odd chuckle he gave, as if he had said, Throw yourself over the cliff if you like, I don’t care.

He turned on her cheek the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupulosity.

It scorched her, and Lily, looking at Minta being charming to Mr. Ramsay at the other end of the table, flinched for her exposed to those fangs, and was thankful.

that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now.

It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it

, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach;

so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today already, of peace, of rest.

Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that remains forever after. This would remain.

“Yes,” she assured William Bankes, “there is plenty for everybody.”

How long would he be read—he would think at once. William Bankes (who was entirely free from all such vanity) laughed, and said he attached no importance to changes in fashion. Who could tell what was going to last—in literature or indeed in anything else?

“Let us enjoy what we do enjoy,” he said.

His integrity seemed to Mrs. Ramsay quite admirable. He never seemed for a moment to think, But how does this affect me?

No, not tomorrow, she said, but soon, she promised him; the next fine day. He was very good. He lay down. She covered him up.

But he would never forget, she knew, and she felt angry with Charles Tansley, with her husband, and with herself, for she had raised his hopes.

Then feeling for her shawl and remembering that she had wrapped it round the boar’s skull, she got up, and pulled the window down another inch or two, and heard the wind, and got a breath of the perfectly indifferent chill night air and murmured …

“We thought of going down to the beach to watch the waves.”

Instantly, for no reason at all, Mrs. Ramsay became like a girl of twenty, full of gaiety.

A mood of revelry suddenly took possession of her. Of course they must go; of course they must go, she cried, laughing;

But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave.

Night, however, succeeds tonight. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness.

he turned upon them. Did they not want to go? he demanded. Had they dared say No (he had some reason for wanting it) he would have flung himself tragically backwards into the bitter waters of despair.

Such a gift he had for gesture. He looked like a king in exile.

Doggedly James said yes. Cam stumbled more wretchedly. Yes, oh yes, they’d both be ready, they said. And it struck her, this was tragedy—not palls, dust, and the shroud; but children coerced, their spirits subdued. James was sixteen, Cam seventeen, perhaps.

deserved, she knew, and she looked up expecting to get it, in one of his sudden roars of ill-temper, complete annihilation.

Instead, Mr. Ramsay smiled. His pall, his draperies, his infirmities fell from him.

Ah yes, he said, holding his foot up for her to look at, they were first-rate boots. There was only one man in England who could make boots like that. Boots are among the chief curses of mankind, he said.

They were made of the finest leather in the world, also. Most leather was mere brown paper and cardboard. He looked complacently at his foot, still held in the air.

They had reached, she felt, a sunny island where peace dwelt, sanity reigned and the sun forever shone, the blessed island of good boots.

Her heart warmed to him. “Now let me see if you can tie a knot,” he said. He poohpoohed her feeble system. He showed her his own invention. Once you tied it, it never came undone. Three times he knotted her shoe;

What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come.

Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying “Life stand still here”; Mrs.

Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly’s wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.

It was to be a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses.

And she began to lay on a red, a grey, and she began to model her way into the hollow there. At the same time she seemed to be sitting beside Mrs. Ramsay on the beach.

Mrs. Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships.

Who knows what we are, what we feel?

Who knows even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren’t things spoilt then, Mrs. Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silence by her side) by saying them? Aren’t we more expressive thus?

He was withered, drawn; she flamboyant, careless. For things had worked loose after the first year or so; the marriage had turned out rather badly.

And this, Lily thought, taking the green paint on her brush, this making up scenes about them, is what we call “knowing” people, “thinking” of them, “being fond” of them!

Not a word of it was true; she had made it up; but it was what she knew them by all the same. She went on tunnelling her way into her picture, into the past.

Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. “About life, about death; about Mrs. Ramsay”—no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark.

Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.

Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body?

No, the other was also the Lighthouse.

For nothing was simply one thing.

The other was the Lighthouse too. It was sometimes hardly to be seen across the bay. In the evening one looked up and saw the eye opening and shutting and the light seemed to reach them in that airy sunny garden where they sat.

But what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything. Get that and start afresh; get that and start afresh; she said desperately, pitching herself firmly again before her easel.

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

She stared, frowning. There was the hedge, sure enough. But one got nothing by soliciting urgently. One got only a glare in the eye from looking at the line of the wall, or from thinking—she wore a grey hat. She was astonishingly beautiful.

He was educating his little sister, Mrs. Ramsay had told her. It was immensely to his credit. Her own idea of him was grotesque, Lily knew well, stirring the plantains with her brush.

Half one’s notions of other people were, after all, grotesque.

They served private purposes of one’s own. He did for her instead of a whipping-boy. She found herself flagellating his lean flanks when she was out of temper. If she wanted to be serious about him she had to help herself to Mrs.

She raised a little mountain for the ants to climb over. She reduced them to a frenzy of indecision by this interference in their cosmogony. Some ran this way, others that.

One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she reflected.

Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought. Among them, must be one that was stone blind to her beauty.

Ramsay, finding an earwig in his milk at breakfast had sent the whole thing flying through the air on to the terrace outside. “An earwig,” Prue murmured, awestruck, “in his milk.” Other people might find centipedes.

But he had built round him such a fence of sanctity, and occupied the space with such a demeanour of majesty that an earwig in his milk was a monster.

But it tired Mrs. Ramsay, it cowed her a little—the plates whizzing and the doors slamming.