Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works

by Virginia Woolf

his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from

the sunken day.

still had the power as she came across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.

Ben striking the half-hour. (The leaden circles dissolved in the air.)

very woman he had always had in mind; young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting.

Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing;

He had said that instinctively, ticketing the moment as he used to do—the death of her soul.

raising his hand like some colossal figure who has lamented the fate of man

for ages in the desert alone with his hands pressed to his forehead,

Seriously and solemnly Richard Dalloway got on his hind legs and said that no decent man ought to read Shakespeare’s sonnets

With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes—one of the tragedies of married life.

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

It was nothing you could put your finger on; there had been no scene, no snap; only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into his.

time was so far diminished that a commerical clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced, genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs. Rigby and Lowndes to give the information gratis, that it was half-past one.

mystery or grand deception practised by hostesses in Mayfair from one-thirty to two, when, with a wave of the hand, the traffic ceases, and there rises instead this profound illusion in the first place about the food—how it is not paid for; and

as if one’s friends were attached to one’s body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread,

Goodness knows he didn’t want to go buying necklaces with Hugh. But there are tides in the body.

But Hugh was on his legs again. He was unspeakably pompous.

Peter always in love, always in love with the wrong woman?

Elizabeth said she had forgotten her gloves. That was because Miss Kilman and her mother hated each other.

The impetuous creature—a pirate—started forward, sprang away; she had to hold the rail to steady herself, for a pirate it was, reckless, unscrupulous, bearing down ruthlessly, circumventing dangerously, boldly snatching a passenger, or ignoring a passenger, squeezing eel-like and arrogant in between, and then rushing insolently all sails spread up Whitehall.

Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air;

and called him by the name of that hawk or crow which being malicious and a great destroyer of crops was precisely like him.

To read her letter needed the devil of an effort. “How heavenly it was to see him. She must tell him that.” That was all.

(Clarissa had sapped something in him permanently),

knew. But when he said, “Bartlett pears,” sitting alone at his table, they felt that he counted on their support in some lawful demand; was champion of a cause which immediately

became their own,

For the great revolution of Mr. Willett’s summer time had taken place since Peter Walsh’s last visit to England.

The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls unrecorded.

How delightful to see you! She was at her worst—effusive, insincere. It was a great mistake to have come.

“Dear Sir Harry!” she said, going up to the fine old fellow who had produced more bad pictures than any other two Academicians in the whole of St. John’s Wood (they were always of cattle, standing in sunset pools absorbing moisture,

all his activities, dining out, racing, were founded on cattle standing absorbing moisture in sunset pools).

(in grey and silver, balancing like a sea-lion at the edge of its tank, barking for invitations,

Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them;