--Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
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.
--Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway She felt as if things were moving past her as she lay stretched on the bed under the single sheet. But it’s not landscape any longer, she thought; it’s people’s lives, their changing lives.
--Virginia Woolf, The Years You can't think how I depend on you, and when you're not there the colour goes out of my life.
--Virginia Woolf in a letter to her sister Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss.
--Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.
--Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes. --Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye It takes four angels to oversee an apocalypse: a recorder to make the book that would be scripture in the new world; a preserver to comfort and save those selected to be the first generation; an accuser to remind them why they suffer; and a destroyer to revoke the promise of survival and redemption, and to teach them the awful truth about furious sheltering grace. --Chris Adrian, The Children's Hospital But it's a curse, a condemnation, like an act of provocation, to have been aroused from not being, to have been conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and sent stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth to weep and worry and wreak havoc and ponder little more than the impending return to oblivion, to invent hopes that are as elaborate as they are fraudulent and poorly constructed, and that burn off the moment they are dedicated, if not before, and are at best only true as we invent them for ourselves or tell them to others, around a fire, in a hovel, while we all freeze or starve or plot or contemplate treachery or betrayal or murder or despair of love, or make daughters and elaborately rejoice in them so that when they are cut down even more despair can be wrung from our hearts, which prove only to have been made for the purpose of being broken. And worse still, because broken hearts continue beating. --Paul Harding, Enon There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'. --Virginia Woolf, The Waves When your best friend is the son of God, you get tired of losing every argument. --Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According To Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.
--Marilynne Robinson, Gilead She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness. --Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. -Cormac McCarthy, The Road The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that things are not mended again. -Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country |
Alissa B.Nothing commonplace about The Common Place. Archives
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