"The people in flight from the terror behind—strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever."
— The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
"Do we really die
only once"
only once"
— W. G. Sebald, from “New Jersey Journey,” trans. Iain Galbraith (via proustitute)
"‘Do you remember the lake?’ she said, in an abrupt voice, under the pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of her throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said ‘lake.’ For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, ‘This is what I have made of it! This!’ And what had she made of it? What, indeed? sitting here sewing this morning with Peter."
— Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
"Here she is mending her dress; mending her dress as usual, he thought; here she’s been sitting all the time I’ve been in India; mending her dress; playing about; going to parties; running to the House and back and all that, he thought, growing more and more irritated, more and more agitated, for there’s nothing in the world so bad for some women as marriage, he thought; and politics; and having a Conservative husband, like the admirable Richard. So it is, so it is, he thought, shutting his knife with a snap."
— Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
"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."
— Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
"…that quality which, since she hadn’t got it herself, she always envied - a sort of abandonment, as if she could say anything, do anything…"
— Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
"To love makes one solitary, she thought."
— Mrs Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf.
"So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks."
— Mrs Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf.
"It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul…"
— Mrs Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf.
"Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?"
— Mrs Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf.
