Jordan's Reviews > Night and Day

“I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one.”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely knew whether they held dreams or realities...and in five minutes she had filled the shell of the old dream with the flesh of life... ”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“and then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart.”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“She held in her hands for one brief moment the globe which we spend our lives in trying to shape, round, whole, and entire from the confusion of chaos.”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“I’ve done my best to see you as you are, without any of this damned romantic nonsense. That was why I asked you here, and it’s increased my folly. When you’re gone I shall look out of that window and think of you. I shall waste the whole evening thinking of you. I shall waste my whole life, I believe.”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“With a brain working and a body working one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was conscious of being.”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“I always wish that you could marry everybody who wants to marry you.”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“Have I never understood you, Katherine? Have I been very selfish?’ 'Yes ... You've asked her for sympathy, and she's not sympathetic; you've wanted her to be practical, and she's not practical.”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“What are you thinking of, Katharine?" he asked suspiciously, noticing her tone of dreaminess and the inapt words.

"I was thinking of you--yes, I swear it. Always of you, but you take such strange shapes in my mind. You've destroyed my loneliness. Am I to tell you how I see you? No, tell me--tell me from the beginning."

Beginning with spasmodic words, he went on to speak more and more fluently, more and more passionately, feeling her leaning towards him, listening with wonder like a child, with gratitude like a woman. She interrupted him gravely now and then.

"But it was foolish to stand outside and look at the windows. Suppose William hadn't seen you. Would you have gone to bed?"

He capped her reproof with wonderment that a woman of her age could have stood in Kingsway looking at the traffic until she forgot.

"But it was then I first knew I loved you!" she exclaimed.

"Tell me from the beginning," he begged her.

"No, I'm a person who can't tell things," she pleaded. "I shall say something ridiculous--something about flames--fires. No, I can't tell you."

But he persuaded her into a broken statement, beautiful to him, charged with extreme excitement as she spoke of the dark red fire, and the smoke twined round it, making him feel that he had stepped over the threshold into the faintly lit vastness of another mind, stirring with shapes, so large, so dim, unveiling themselves only in flashes, and moving away again into the darkness, engulfed by it.”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“You come and see me among flowers and pictures, and think me mysterious, romantic, and all the rest of it. Being yourself very inexperienced and very emotional, you go home and invent a story about me, and now you can't separate me from the person you've imagined me to be. You call that, I suppose, being in love; as a matter of fact it's being in delusion.”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“You’re going to go on dreaming and imagining and making up stories about me as you walk along the street, and pretending that we’re riding in a forest, or landing on an island —'
'No. I shall think of you ordering dinner, paying bills, doing the accounts, showing old ladies the relics —”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day