If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I donโt admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers donโt do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.
Virginia WoolfHis eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely knew whether they held dreams or realities...and in five minutes she had filled the shell of the old dream with the flesh of life.
Virginia WoolfSo that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball
Virginia WoolfWhen the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, โLook, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.
Virginia WoolfSo long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.
Virginia Woolf