"These attempts to say, ‘I am this, I am that,’ which we make, coming together, like separated part of one body and soul, are false. Something has been left out from fear. Something has been altered, from vanity. We have tried to accentuate differences. From the desire to be separate we have laid stress upon our faults, and what is particular to us. But there is a chain whirling round, round, in a steel-blue circle beneath.”

“Everybody seems to be doing things for this moment only; and never again. Never again. The urgency of it all is fearful.”

“It becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many. Bernard in public bubbles; in private, is secretive. That is what they do not understand, for they are now undoubtedly discussing me, saying I escape them, am evasive. They do not understand that I have to effect different transitions; have to cover the entrances of several different men who alternately act their parts as Bernard.”

“To be contracted by another person into a single being- how strange.”

“We are not as simple as our friends would have us to meet their needs.”

“Then individuality asserts itself. They are off. They are impelled by some necessity…For myself, I have no aim. I have no ambition. I will let myself be carried on by the general impulse…Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me, here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.”

“We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones, and silence.”

“But I am aware of our ephemeral passage.”

“I have been traversing the sunless territory of non-identity.”

“There is nothing to lay hold of. I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”

“I lie sluggish in bed for days…I feel myself carried round like an insect on top of the earth and could swear that, sitting here, I feel its hardness, its turning movement. I have no desire to go the opposite way from the earth.”

“I am very tolerant. I am not a moralist. I have too great a sense of the shortness of life and its temptations to rule red lines.”

“Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it.”

“I do not pray. I revenge myself upon the day. I wreak my spite upon its image. You are dead now.”

“The others are handing in their answers, one by one. Now it is my turn. But I have no answer. The others are allowed to go. They slam the door. Miss Hudson goes. I am left alone to find an answer. The figures mean nothing now. Meaning has gone…I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in it, and I myself am outside the loop…The world is entire, and I am outside of it, crying, ‘Oh, save me, from being blown for ever outside the loop of time.’”

“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my footy stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my hand against some hard door to call myself back to my body.”

“I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and I fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then, very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed. With intermittent shocks, sudden as the springs of a tiger, life emerges having its dark crest from the sea. It is to this we are attached; it is to this we are bound, as bodies to wild horses. And yet we have invented devices for filling up the crevices and disguising these fissures.”

“If I could believe…that I should grow old in pursuit and change, I should be rid of my fear: nothing persists. One moment does not lead to another…I am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal with it as you do- I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are al violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces. I have no end in view. I do not know how to run minute to minute and hour to hour, solving them by some natural force until they make the whole and indivisible mass that you call life.”

“It is beyond our reach. Yet there I venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams.”

“All palpable forms of life have failed me. Unless I can stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown down the eternal corridors forever.”

“We settle down, like walruses stranded on rocks, like heavy bodies incapable of waddling to the sea, hoping for a wave to lift us, but we are too heavy, and too much dry shingle lies between us and the sea.”

“‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’- but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?”

“The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation.”

“None had the courage to be one thing rather than another. What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and servility!”

“Far from being allowed to spread in wider and wider circles of understanding that may at last (so I dream, falling off the edge of the earth at night when my bed floats suspended) embrace the entire world, I must go through the antics of the individual.”

“But we are doomed, all of us by the apple trees, by the immitigable tree which we cannot pass.”

“‘In a world which contains the present moment,’ said Neville, ‘why discriminate? Nothing should be named lest by so doing we change it. Let it exist, this bank, this beauty, and I, for one instant, steeped in pleasure.’”

“How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one’s friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one’s self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another.”

“I am merely ‘Neville’ to you, who see the narrow limits of my life and the line it cannot pass. But to myself I am immeasurable; a net whose fibres pass imperceptibly beneath the world. My net is almost indistinguishable from that which it surrounds.”

“Oppose ourselves to this illimitable chaos…this formless imbecility.”

“I am the stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs.”

“I cannot translate it to you so that its binding power ropes you in, and makes it clear to you that you are aimless; and the rhythm is cheap and worthless; and so remove that degradation which, if you are unaware of your aimlessness, pervades you, making you senile, even while you are young.”

“Something deeper than they are, stronger than love and more subterranean.”

“I have tried to draw from the living flesh the stone lodged at the centre.”

“I am not a single and passing being. My life is not a moment’s bright spark like that on the surface of a diamond. I go beneath ground torturously, as if a warder carried a lamp from cell to cell.”

“But listen…to the world moving through abysses of infinite space.”

“How can we do battle against this flood; what has permanence?”

from The Waves by Virginia Woolf