Tahseen Fatema > Tahseen's Quotes

“There are always two things that fill me with wonder—the starry heavens above me and the conscious self within me.”
― Raymond A. Moody Jr., Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife

“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees
and changing leaves.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street.”
― Virginia Woolf

“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“...she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

“Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks—all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art”
― Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Four: 1931-1935

“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next. ”
― Virginia Woolf , The Waves

“I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour
to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my
world.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?”
― Virginia Woolf

“Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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

“The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable --- this interminable life.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary