Great Throughts Treasury

"For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that" - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Here we slept, she says. And he adds, Kisses without number. Waking in the morning - Silver between the trees - Upstairs - In the garden -When summer came -In winter snowtime -The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"It is harder to kill a phantom than a reality." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Mrs. Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"One must love everything." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"She left the room without looking in the glass. From which we deduce the fact, he said to himself, as if he were writing a novel, that Miss Sarah Pargiter has never attracted the love of men. Or had she? He did not know. These little snapshot pictures of people left much to be desired, these little surface pictures that one made, like a fly crawling over a face, and feeling, here’s the nose, here’s the brow." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs. Ramsay. She did not know how she would have put it; but it would have been something critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness. Looking along the level of Mr. Bankes’s glance at her, she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped; they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr. Bankes extended over them both. Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book); the best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw there. ‘But why different, and how different?’ she asked herself, scraping her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like clods with no life in them now, yet she vowed, she would inspire them, force them to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably? She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness. She was willful; she was commanding (of course, Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am much younger, an insignificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune of Mrs. Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on one’s bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was always that—hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it might be—Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr. Carmichael snuffling and sniffing; Mr. Bankes saying, The vegetable salts are lost. All this she would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, moving over to the window, in pretense that she must go,—it was dawn, she could see the sun rising,—half turn back, more intimately, but still always laughing, insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole world whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs. Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs. Ramsay had had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs. Ramsay listening; shaded lights and regular breathing." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers ... Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft in the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"So that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, ‘I am guarding you—I am your support, but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorsely beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow—this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Sometimes, one trembling star comes in the clear sky and makes me think the world beautiful and we maggots deforming even the trees with our lusts." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The eyes of others our prisons, their thoughts our cages." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"The people we are most fond of are not good for us when we are ill." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms—his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought—making onself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and quite true; all this one could never share—it smashed to atoms." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Whenever you see a board up with Trespassers will be prosecuted, trespass at once." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top." - Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf

"Her mind was like a spring-tide in full flood; rich, shining, vigorous, and capable of infinite variety." - Vera Mary Brittain

"A god will also give us an end to this." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL

"A woman is an ever fickle and changeable thing." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL

"A woman the leader of the enterprise." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL

"Their own death accompanies the wound they inflict." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL

"What exactly is suffering? Our pains are caused by our wrong viewpoints toward things. The false self throws up an imaginary picture of how it insists things should be. And every time this 'should be' clashes with what actually happens, we react painfully. The problem is not what actually happens, but our demands that something else should happen. Don't take my word for this; experiment for yourself." - Vernon Howard, fully Vernon Linwood Howard

"There are short-cuts to happiness and dancing is one of them" - Vicki Baum, fully Hedwig "Vicki" Baum

"A man's philosophy is the bed he lies on." - Victor Hugo

"Angel is the only word in the language that cannot be worn out. No other word would resist the pitiless use lovers make of it." - Victor Hugo

"Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men touch that unknown thing?" - Victor Hugo

"In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a man, and I cry to all: Help me!" - Victor Hugo

"It is possible to conceive of something even more terrible than a hell of suffering, and that is a hell of boredom." - Victor Hugo

"Love, thine is the future. Death, I use thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, there shall be in the future neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance nor blood for blood." - Victor Hugo

"Man suffers, that may be so; but look at Taurus rising!...These thinkers forget to love. The zodiac has such success with them that it prevents them from seeing the weeping child. God eclipses the soul." - Victor Hugo

"Nobody knows like a woman how to say things that are both sweet and profound. Sweetness and depth, this is all of woman; this is Heaven." - Victor Hugo

"Not being heard is no reason for silence." - Victor Hugo

"There are axioms in probity, in honesty, in justice, just as much as there are axioms in geometry; and the truths of morality are no more at the mercy of a vote than are the truths of algebra." - Victor Hugo

"When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right." - Victor Hugo

"Woe to the intellectual who lets himself fall completely from thought into reverie! He thinks he will rise again easily, and he says that, after all, it is the same thing. An error! Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie its pleasure. To replace thought with reverie is to confound poison with nourishment." - Victor Hugo

"Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money." - Viktor Frankl, fully Viktor Emil Frankl

"A woman should perform the duties of a wife without any complain, give birth to good children and bring them up as ideal citizens." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"A woman who possesses all the qualities will quite naturally not have any problem in fulfilling her obligations towards her family and quite obviously keep everybody in the family happy and satisfied. A house in which such a woman dwells is always prosperous and full of comforts and luxuries." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"About thee (my husband) I have placed the overpowering (plant), upon thee placed the very overpowering one. May thy mind run after me as a calf after the cow, as water along its course." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"I may wear ear-rings, and a pearl necklace around my neck; my bed may be adorned with red blankets, flowers and red powder; but without the Lord of the Universe, where can I search for peace?" - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

"A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin