I am very tolerant. I am not a moralist. I have too great a sense of the shortness of life and its temptations to rule red lines. Yet I am not so indiscriminate as you think, judging me--as you judge me--from my fluency. I have a little dagger of contempt and severity hidden up my sleeve. But I am apt to be deflected. I make stories. I twist up toys out of anything. A girl sits at a cottage door; she is waiting; for whom? Seduced, or not seduced? The headmaster sees the hole in the carpet. He sighs.
His wife, drawing her fingers through the waves of her still abundant hair, reflects--et cetera. Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter--all are stories.
But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for someone to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then another, I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.
But Louis, wild-eyed but severe, in his attic, in his office, has formed unalterable conclusions upon the true nature of what is to be known.'
Discussion
I think this is simply a great piece of writing. It describes the complexity of moral philosophy and truth that woolf often explores in her novels. I think my favorite part of this quote is “Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter--all are stories.
But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for someone to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then another, I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower”. Woolf aptly claims that truth is something no one actually knows. As such, clinging to one notion of truth may not be the best choice, it is a transformative process as one waits, speculates, and makes notes to further understand “truth”, all the while never clinging to the one notion or idea of how things work.
Woolf adequately conveys this sense of hopelessness in understanding truth, all the while describing the way people cope with this lack of knowledge to lead their lives.