"Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself,..." - Quote by Virginia Woolf
Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.
More by Virginia Woolf
“One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.”
“Dance music ... stirs some barbaric instinct - lulled asleep in our sober lives - you forget centuries of civilization in a second, & yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.”
“To enjoy freedom ... we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose.”
More on Human Nature
“It is not in how one soul approaches another but in how it withdraws that I knowr its affinity and solidarity with the other.”
“Those only are despicable who fear to be despised.”
“Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.”
More on Suffering
“You’ll ache. And you’re going to love it. It will crush you. And you’re still going to love all of it.”
“Do to us what you will, and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and as difficult as it is, we will still love you. But we assured that we'll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”
“Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer.”