"Doesn't one always think of the past,..." - Quote by Virginia Woolf

“And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!”

“But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality has no such simple effect upon the mind of man.”

“If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.”

“Whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes.”

“I was adored once too.”

“The past was gone and the future had yet to unfold, and he knew he should focus his life on the present. Yet his day-to-day existence suddenly struck him as endless and unbearable.”

“So new to him," she muttered, "so old to me; so strange to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us!”

“A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.”

“We all know that books burn, yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny of every kind.”