To the Lighthouse

by Virginia Woolf
England
25 Jan 1882 // 28 Mar 1941
Writer

Quotes



But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them.

To the Lighthouse
Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.

To the Lighthouse
So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball.

To the Lighthouse
Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life? - startling, unexpected, unknown?

To the Lighthouse
To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

To the Lighthouse
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.

To the Lighthouse
Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

To the Lighthouse
She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

To the Lighthouse
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To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

 

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