He sighed profoundly, and flung himself - there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word - on the earth at the foot of the oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding; or the deck of a tumbling ship - it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out. To the oak tree he tied it and as he lay there, gradually the flutter in and about him stilled itself; the little leaves hung, the deer stopped; the pale summer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy on the ground; and he lay so still that by degrees the deer stopped nearer and the rooks wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and the dragonflies shot past, as if all the fertility and amorous activity of a summer's evening were woven web-like about his body. Virginia Woolf
Some Similar Quotes
  1. I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain. - John Keats

  2. What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness. - John Steinbeck

  3. Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance. - Yoko Ono

  4. One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy. - Aristotle

  5. Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time. - John Lubbock

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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