Virginia Woolf Quotes

This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else, hanging on for a moment only to be washed away.

Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment.

We are all born and someday we'll all die. Most likely to some degree alone. Our aloneness in this world is, maybe not anymore, a thing to mourn.

Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.

Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.

We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone.

I think about dying. I've come to realize we all die alone in one way or another.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them; and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things.

Life is like a fire. Flames which the passer-by forgets. Ashes which the wind scatters. A man lived.

Nothing is forever in the Theatre. Whatever it is, it's here, it flares up, burns hot and then its gone.

Sunrise doesn't last all morning, a cloudburst doesn't last all day, seems my love is up and has left you with no warning. It's not always going to be this grey. All things must pass, all things must pass away.

Nothing comes back. The eye sees for a moment, the ear hears, but look, now it is gone.

To venerate the simple days Which lead the seasons by, Needs but to remember That from you or I They may take the trifle Termed mortality!

Even though in the world you are the most learned scholar of the time, Behold the vanishing of this world and this time!

And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.

Nothing lasts forever. That's the tragedy and the miracle of existence - that everything is impermanent. Everything changes. All we can do is make the best of the time we have. And go down shooting, naturally.

When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.

Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart; The end lost in dream, They float past our view, We only watch their glad, early start. Freighted with hope, Crimsoned with joy, We scatter the leaves of our opening rose; Their widening scope, Their distant employ, We never shall know. And the stream as it flows Sweeps them away, Each one is gone Ever beyond into infinite ways. We alone stay While years hurry on, The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.

The morning Sunne never lasts a day.

Sunsets are loved because they vanish. Flowers are loved because they go. The dogs of the field and the cats of the kitchen are loved because soon they must depart. These are not the sole reasons, but at the heart of morning welcomes and afternoon laughters is the promise of farewell. In the gray muzzle of an old dog we see goodbye. In the tired face of an old friend we read long journeys beyond returns.