It was his power, his gift, suddenly to shed all superfluities, to shrink and diminish so that he looked barer and felt sparer, even physically, yet lost none of his intensity of mind, and so to stand on his little ledge facing the dark of human ignorance, how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we stand on - that was his fate, his gift. But having thrown away, when he dismounted, all gestures and fripperies, all trophies of nuts and roses, and shrunk so that not only fame but even his own name was forgotten by him, he kept even in that desolation a vigilance which spared no phantom and luxuriated in no vision, and it was in this guise that he inspired in William Bankes (intermittently) and in Charles Tansley (obsequiously) and in his wife now, when she looked up and saw him standing at the edge of the lawn, profoundly, reverence, and pity, and gratitude too, as a stake driven into the bed of a channel upon which the gulls perch and the waves beat inspires in merry boat-loads a feeling of gratitude for the duty it is taking upon itself of marking the channel out there in the floods alone. Virginia Woolf
Some Similar Quotes
  1. All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart. - Tahereh Mafi

  2. Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love - Unknown

  3. Are you upset little friend? Have you been lying awake worrying? Well, don't worry... I'm here. The flood waters will recede, the famine will end, the sun will shine tomorrow, and I will always be here to take care of you. - Charles M. Schulz

  4. It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being. - John Joseph Powell

  5. How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen... - Margaret Atwood

More Quotes By Virginia Woolf
  1. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

  2. Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

  3. Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>So I am doing what seems the...

  4. What does the brain matter compared with the heart?

  5. To love makes one solitary.

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