Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works

by Virginia Woolf

For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him.

But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.

the spirit of religion was abroad with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide.

Only one person in the world could be as he was, in love.

women live much more in the past than we do,

with that extraordinary gift, that woman’s gift, of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be.

With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes—one of the tragedies of married life. With a mind of her own, she must always be quoting Richard—as if one couldn’t know to a tittle what Richard thought by reading the Morning Post of a morning!

A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again), but now, at the age of fifty-three, one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much, indeed.

But women, he thought, shutting his pocket-knife, don’t know what passion is. They don’t know the meaning of it to men.

The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair.

What she liked was simply life.

After that, how unbelievable death was!—that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant …

First, it was cheap; second, she was over forty; and did not, after all, dress to please.

When people are happy they have a reserve, she had told Elizabeth, upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre (she was fond of such metaphors), jolted by every pebble—so

Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

suicidal thoughts?

Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear.

For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying—what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.

Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life—one scratched on the wall.