Virginia Woolf

Kate Flint

Tracing the lives of a group of friends, this novel follows their development from childhood to middle age. Social events, individual achievements and disappointments form the outer structure of the book, but the focus is the inner life of the characters which is conveyed in rich poetic language.

The Waves

loisesya

Francesca 

I will give; I will enrich; I will return to the world this beauty. I will bind my flowers in one garland and advancing with my hand outstretched will present them—Oh! to whom?

I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. 

yana

i think sometimes i am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. i am the seasons, i think sometimes, january, may, november; the mud, the mist, the dawn.

madina

The mind grows rings; the identity becomes robust; pain is absorbed in growth.

lelayna

I hold a stalk in my hand. 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.

Look, the loop of the figure is beginning to fill with time; it holds the world in it. I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in it, and I myself am outside the loop; which I now join-so-and seal up, and make entire. The world is entire, and I am outside of it, crying, “Oh save me, from being blown for ever outside the loop of time!”

n.  littéraire

We are nothing, I said, and 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.

The Waves quotes

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