The Waves Quotes

“I am nobody. I have no face ... All dressed in brown serge, has robbed me of my identity.”

“I shall be like my mother, silent in a blue apron locking up the cupboards.”

“My body goes before me like a lantern down a dark lane, bringing one thing after another out of darkness into a ring of light. I dazzle you.”

“Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half sheets of notepaper. What delights me is the confusion, the height, the indifference, and the fury.”

“Beneath us lie the lights of the herring fleet. The cliffs vanish. Rippling small, rippling grey, innumerable waves spread beneath us. I touch nothing. I see nothing.”

“But nature is too vegetable, too vapid. She has only sublimities and vastitudes and water and leaves. I begin to wish for firelight, privacy, and the limbs of one person.”

“Should I seek out some tree? Should I desert these form rooms and libraries, and the broad yellow page in which I read Catullus, for woods and fields? Should I walk under beech trees, or saunter along the river bank, where the trees meet united like lovers in the water?”

“I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am.”

“I oppose to what is passing this ramrod of beaten steel. I will not submit to this aimless passing of billycock hats and Homburg hats and all the plumed and variegated head-dresses of women . . . and the words that trail drearily without human meaning; I will reduce you to order.”

“We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling me over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.”

“How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground!”