To The Lighthouse Quotes

“With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“...so now, Mrs. Ramsay thought, she could return to that dream land, that unreal but fascinating place, the Manning's drawing-room at Marlow twenty years ago; where one moved about without haste or anxiety, for there was no future to worry about. She knew what had happened to them, what to her. It was like reading a good book again, for she knew the end of that story, since it had happened twenty years ago, and life, which shot down even from this dining-room table in cascades, heaven knows where, was sealed up there, and lay, like a lake, placidly between its banks.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Yet she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreathes heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile and inhumane than love; yet it is also absolutely beautiful and necessary.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle's.”
― Virgina Woolf

“She was the most beautiful person he had ever seen. With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“It is extremely difficult to say with any sense at all of adequacy what To the Lighthouse is all about.”
― Arnold Kettle

“She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had time to read them. Alas! even the books that had been given her, and inscribed by the hand of the poet himself: 'For her whose wishes must be obeyed' ... 'The happier Helen of our day' ... disgraceful to say, she had never read them.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“That people should love like this, that Mr. Bankes should feel this for Mrs. Ramsay (she glanced at him musing) was helpful, was exalting.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“She had some hidden reason of her own for attaching great importance to this choosing what her mother was to wear. What was the reason, Mrs. Ramsay wondered, standing still to let her clasp the necklace she had chosen, divining, through her own past, some deep, some buried, some quite speechless feeling that one had for one's mother at Rose's age. Like all feelings felt for oneself, Mrs. Ramsay thought, it made one sad. It was so inadequate, what one could give in return; and what Rose felt was quite out of proportion to anything she actually was. And Rose would grow up; and Rose would suffer, she supposed, with these deep feelings, and she said she was ready now...”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“I have had my vision”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“...you have neither wife nor child (without any sexual feeling, she longed to cherish that loneliness)...”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“...(for the setting of her beauty was always that - hasty, but apt)...”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair— He took her bag.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Ma la bellezza non era tutto. La bellezza aveva questo guaio: veniva troppo immediatamente, veniva troppo completamente. Fermava la vita - la gelava. Ci si dimenticava le piccole agitazioni; l’arrossire, il pallore, qualche strana distorsione, qualche luce o ombra, che rendeva per un momento riconoscibile la faccia e tuttavia le dava una qualità che in seguito si vedeva per sempre.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Era comunque una forma di rapporto esigente. Altri oggetti di adorazione si contentavano quell’adorazione; uomini, donne, Dio, tutti permettevano che si adorassero prostrati in ginocchio; ma quella forma, fosse anche soltanto l’alone di un paralume bianco contro un tavolo di vimini, incitava a un combattimento perpetuo, sfidava a una lotta in cui si era costretti ad avere la peggio. Sempre (era nella sua natura, o nel suo sesso, non sapeva quale delle due) prima di scambiare la fluidità della vita con la concentrazione della pittura ella aveva qualche momento di nudità in cui pareva un’anima mai nata, un’anima spogliata del corpo, esitante su qualche pinnacolo ventoso ed esposta senza protezione a tutti i soffi di dubbio.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now. It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem’s (Paul’s was exquisite) into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road.”
― Virginia Woolf

“The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.”
― Virginia Woolf

“(...) she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“...and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow—

Woolf, Virginia. The Complete Works . Pandora's Box. Kindle Edition.”
― Virginia Woolf