Leonard Woolf

“ The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with huge diamond-cut red eyes. One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth ”

“ A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with ones thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water-lilies, and hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs. ”

“ And I thought of our race, its traditions and its faith, how they are vanishing in the life that surrounds us. The old spirit, the old faith, they had kept alive hot and vigorous—for how many centuries?—when we were spat upon, outcasts. ”

“ A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for the expression in our vague and almost glassy eyes. And the novelists in future will realise more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps ”

“ I thought to myself, "a mere keeper of graves is touched by it as much as I am. He isn't a Jew now any more than I am. We're Jews only externally now, in our black hair and our large noses, in the way we stand and the way we walk. ”

“ Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hair pin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race horse. ”

“ I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is—a nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?
Here is Nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker's Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker ”

“ Some people don't do anything, never come near the place, don't spend a penny on their graves. Then of course they go like that. It will get worse and worse, for we only bury reserves here now. Sometimes it ain't anyone's fault: families die out, the graves are forgotten. It don't look nice, but well, I say, what does it matter after all? When I'm dead, they may chuck me on the dung-hill, for all I care."
He looked down his nose at the rows and rows of dirty white grave-stones, which were under his charge, critically, with an air of hostility, as if they had done him some wrong. ”

“ All the time I'm dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. ”

“ It's a big cemetery, very big, almost as big as Golders Green, and they keep the gardens very nicely. Well, my poor wife lies there—my first wife, I've married again, you see, and she's living and well, thank God—and I went on the first anniversary to visit the grave and put flowers on it.
There you are now, there's another curious thing. I often wonder why we do it. It's not as if it did anyone any good. I don't believe in immortality, nor do you, nor do any of us. But I go and put flowers on her grave though it won't do her any good, poor soul. ”

“ Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people—what an airless shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! ”

“ Our women are as good, better than Christian women. Aren't they as beautiful, as clever, as good wives? I know my poor mother, God rest her soul, used to say: "My son," she said, "if you come to me and say you want to marry a good girl, a Jewess, I don't care whether she hasn't a chemise to her back, I'll welcome her—but if you marry a Christian, if she's as rich as Solomon, I've done with you—don't you ever dare to come into my house again." ”

“ The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have—what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilisation—let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of all loses—what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble—three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? ”

“ Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that one won't be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour—dim pinks and blues—which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become—I don't know what. ”

“ I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. ”

“ What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice, and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases. ”

“ It may even be caused by some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not being a very vigilant house-keeper—look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can believe. But I know a house-keeper, a woman with the profile of a policeman, those little round buttons marked even upon the edge of her shadow, a woman with a broom in her hand, a thumb on picture frames, an eye under beds and she talks always of art. ”

“ The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that when a moor-hen dives one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out ”

“ But inside we're Jews no longer. Even he doesn't believe, the keeper of Jewish graves! The old spirit, the ancient faith has gone out of him."
I was wrong; I know now, and I'll tell you how I came to see it. The spirit's still there all right; it comes out under the apple-blossom, eh?, and it came out among the tombs too.
The next time I saw him was another November day, an English, a London day; O Lord, his nose showed in it very white and florid under the straight houses and the chimney-pots and the heavy, melancholy dripping sky. ”

“ I wanted someone to talk to, and though I didn't expect to get much comfort out of a cemetery-keeper, I said by way of conversation, as I gave him a shilling:
"You keep these gardens very nicely."
He looked at me over the gold rims of his glasses:
"We do our best. I haven't been here long, you know, but I do my best. And a man can't do more, now can he?" ”

“ Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf. There must be some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them a name. What sort of man is an antiquary, I wonder? ”

“ He leant his forehead on his hand, and people looking in through the open door, for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer's evening,—But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesn't interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself ”

“ It was crowded with people, and I sat down at the only vacant table, and watched them eating plum-cake and drinking tea quietly, soberly, under the gentle apple-blossom.
A man came up the garden looking quickly from side to side for an empty place. ”

“ Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things, I wonder, those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman ”