TO THE LIGHTHOUSE QUOTES

“So with the lamps out and the windows open at night, in the hot summer, the little faint sounds paused, the house creaked, the light was shadowed, and I thought to myself, why, why, why did one knock one’s head against this granite severity, this remorseless weight, this immovable fidelity of brick and stone? We have been in this house hundreds of years. We have been here more or less forever.” – Mr. Ramsay

“It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.” – Mr. Ramsay

“One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy.” – Lily Briscoe

“The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths.” – Mrs. Ramsay

“It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.” – Lily Briscoe

“That was the man she loved, who had stood by her for, she would say, those were the words she would use, stood by her for all those years.” – Mrs. Ramsay

“It was fragrant, he breathed in deep lungfuls of the fragrance, feeling his breast expanded by all that was expressed in the autumn fires, the running mists, the countless nights, a white moon rising and setting behind the trees… But also, he felt, he understood her now?” – Mr. Ramsay

“I see you enthralled him, he murmured, almost jealously, for he would have liked to have for himself what she had, the otter among the water lilies, the trailing red plants, for himself the honey comb of the fig tree, the sea.” – Mr. Ramsay

“For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of – to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.” – Mrs. Ramsay “The night after Mr. Carmichael’s dinner she made up a little story for herself, though she never found time to write it.” – Lily Briscoe

“For it was thus, he thought, putting to his lips the smoking pipe that had laid on the bedspread, that human beings changed and being laid in their graves their survivors mourned for them not at all.” – Mr. Ramsay

“He watched the sailboat sway to and fro, glowing until it looked like a rose. On it lads were making a tune with voice and strings.” – Mr. Ramsay

“Indeed, since it was from the arms of all mothers and aunts that, with a little assistance from the parish, she had emerged, Mrs. Ramsay[3] was held, even by her own son, to possess an inordinate power of sympathy.” – Narrator SMALL TOWN MENTALITY QUOTES

“What did she wish that he should think again? she asked, laying her fillets of ermine on her knees. She began to think, What had he been thinking? What did he wish that she should think again?” – Mrs. Ramsay

“People must go on working, just as they must go on living; but there seniors should step in and do the work. She would sometimes form a project and really believe in the worth of what she was going to say.” – Mrs. Ramsay

“He had no doubt of his own genius. Like all uneducated men, he knew the value of his own intellect perhaps better than the value of any other.” – Narrator (about Mr. Tansley)

“It excited her still more when he described his paper as the very latest word on Shakespeare – it was not worth more than sixpence a line.” – Mrs. Ramsay

“And often, she thought, one sees them sitting by her side when her eyes are closed; one sees them with eyes open in the dark too; she wakes in the night and sees them in the window, those four ghostly figures, with tragic eyes.” – Mrs. Ramsay

“And instantly she added, ‘Why not make it again?’ – She was a marvellous mistress of the revels! The door opened and Percival came in.” – Narrator

“She was pleased to watch him wrap up the fish they had bought together.” – Mrs. Ramsay

“Already there was a party of girls among the cypress trees on the lawn.” – Narrator

“What had she been doing? Where had she been living all these years? There were the children, so much taller; but why were there children?” – Mrs. Ramsay

“She had once sought stupidity, and then avoided it; feared life, and then… What had she cared if Cambodian carvings had been destroyed?” – Lily Briscoe

“How he came to speak to her about life, about what he had said to the Lighthouse, he did not know; but he saw how she swerved and hesitated and was silent. Well, they had done one good day’s work, and the whole world lay before them.” – Mr. Ramsay