Virginia Woolf Phrases Quotations

travelers are much at the mercy of phrases ... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains ...

After all, what is a lovely phrase? One that has mopped up as much Truth as it can hold.

I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.

But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.