More from The Years by V. Woolf

...watching the gulls cut the air into sharp white patterns with their wings.

The sun dappled the table and gave her a curious look of transparency, as if she were caught in a net of light; as if she were composed of lozenges of floating colours.

Everything was full of the stir, the potency, the fecundity of spring.

...with eyes that seemed like bright stones under a film of water. They're like drops of glass under water, he thought.

The fire was still blazing; the chairs, drawn out in a circle, still seemed to hold the skeleton of the party in their empty arms.

Although it was close on midnight, it scarcely seemed to be night; but rather some ethereal disembodied day,...

She drank; the wine seemed to caress a knob in her spine.

The sparks went volleying up the chimney in a shower of gold eyes.

Here and there a star pierced the blue.

The uproar of the traffic merged into one growl.

Innumerable needles of water shot down.

"If we do not know ourselves, how can we know other people?" he had said.

The sun gilded the fruit; the flowers had a blurred brilliance.

A plain face scarcely changed; whereas beautiful faces wither.

This half knowing people, this half being known, this feeling of the eye on the flesh, like a fly crawling--how uncomfortable it was, he thought;...

"...how can we make laws, religions, that fit, that fit, when we don't know ourselves?"

"--society or solitude; which is best," he finished his sentence.

The curl of apple-skin lay on his plate, coiled up like a snake's skin, he thought; and the banana-skin was like the finger of a glove that had been ripped open.

She waved her hand towards a long lamp-starred street on the left.