The Voyage Out
1925
The first novel from one of the twentieth century's most revolutionary voices. Rachel Vinrace is twenty-four and has never been further than Richmond when she boards the Euphrosyne for South America, armed with little more than innocence and a vague sense that life ought to contain more than this. What begins as a conventional journey becomes something far stranger: an education in desire, loneliness, and the vast indifference of the world to a young woman's inner turmoil. Woolf's portrait of Rachel's awakening is tender, sharp, and ultimately devastating, a writer finding her signature stream of consciousness while telling a story that feels startlingly modern.
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“I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.””
— Virginia Woolf
“I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.””
— Virginia Woolf
“You’re the only person I’ve ever met who seems to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say a thing.””
— Virginia Woolf
“We're all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person's opinion of another person? One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn't know””
— Virginia Woolf
“It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.””
— Virginia Woolf
“They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid-ocean, and see every detail of each others' faces, and hear whatever they chanced to say.””
— Virginia Woolf
“That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.””
— Virginia Woolf
“For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone."What is it to be in love?" she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea. Hypnotized by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew away, she rose, and within, her two books beneath her arm returned again, much as a soldier prepares for battle.””
— Virginia Woolf
“To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently.””
— Virginia Woolf
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Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-voyage-out-78343fb8-acee-42fe-b0f4-071b2cbe756a.Woolf, V. (1925). The Voyage Out. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-voyage-out-78343fb8-acee-42fe-b0f4-071b2cbe756aWoolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-voyage-out-78343fb8-acee-42fe-b0f4-071b2cbe756a.
