Virginia Woolf Quotes

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

There rises the moon, broad and tranquil, through the branches of a walnut tree on a hill opposite. I apostrophize it in the words of Faust; "O gentle moon, that lookest for the last time upon my agonies!" --or something to that effect.

Thou little bird, thou dweller by the sea, Why takest thou its melancholy voice, And with that boding cry Along the waves dost thou fly? Oh! rather, bird, with me Through this fair land rejoice!

Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.

And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!

There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

In 1957's 'There's No You,' Sinatra is suspended at the intersection of a loss he can't face and a memory he can't relinquish.

We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance.

Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.

And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you.

Fair as the moon and joyful as the light; Tot wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright; Not as she is, but as she fills his dreams.

But what of life whose bitter hungry sea Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night Covers the days which never more return? Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn We lose too soon, and only find delight In withered husks of some dead memory.

Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.

I wake up thinking of yesterday. The joy is in remembering; the pain is in knowing it was yesterday.

The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.

My soul's the present shadow of a presence gone.

The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.

I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the Moon has become that flat, remote circle, I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.

Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.