Jacob's Room Quotes

“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“It is no use trying to sum people up.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this -- and much more than this is true -- why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us--why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.

Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps up omnibuses.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them. ”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“Marvelous are the innocent. ”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“One must love everything.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“...anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole--they see all sorts of things--they see themselves...”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“I am what I am, and intend to be it,' for which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for himself.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must
have been apparent to everyone for hundreds of years, no one
has left any adequate account of it.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room