Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Sometimes 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. (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death…Then there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear…Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness.
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (via awritersruminations)
She gazed back over the sea, at the island. But the leaf was losing its sharpness. It was very small; it was very distant. The sea was more important now than the shore. Waves were all round them, tossing and sinking, with a log wallowing down one wave; a gull riding on another. About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she murmured, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.
— Virginia Woolf (via inherwar)
She was about to split asunder, she felt. The agony was so terrific. If she could grasp her, if she could clasp her, if she could make her hers absolutely and for ever and then die; that was all she wanted. But to sit here, unable to think of anything to say…
— from Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (via vwvw)
