To the Lighthouse

This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile and inhumane than love; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.

there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, ‘This is he,’ or, ‘This is she.’

For it was extraordinary to think that they had been capable of going on living all these years when she had not thought of them more than once all that time.

need not marry, thank heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution. She would move the tree rather more to the middle.

she pitied men always as if they lacked something – women never, as if they had something.

And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her.

wasn’t crying only for that. She was crying for something else. We might all sit down and cry, she felt. But she did not know what for.

She could not understand how she had ever felt any emotion or any affection for him. She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything,

She disliked anything that reminded her that she had been seen sitting thinking.