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764f2d1
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Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waters, he went over me, his devastating presence--dragging me open, laying bare the pebbles on the shore of my soul.
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Virginia Woolf |
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c88126b
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I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.
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Virginia Woolf |
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34f7935
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Wind and storm colored July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself ba..
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Virginia Woolf |
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c5c4578
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But Orlando was a woman -- Lord Palmerston had just proved it. And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman's whole existence. And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing at her table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for that calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in t..
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Virginia Woolf |
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cc515c3
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Sometimes, one trembling star comes in the clear sky and makes me think the world beautiful and we maggots deforming even the trees with our lusts.
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Virginia Woolf |
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b054f52
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I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.
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virginia-woolf
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Virginia Woolf |
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ed83a0e
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Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting.
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Virginia Woolf |
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c9eab64
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For the truth is ... that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs. Their packs scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness. They desert the fallen.
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Virginia Woolf |
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925fcc5
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One could not but play for a moment with the thought of what might have happened if Charlotte Bronte had possessed say three hundred a year -- but the foolish woman sold the copyright of her novels outright for fifteen hundred pounds; had somehow possessed more knowledge of the busy world, and towns and regions full of life; more practical experience, and intercourse with her kind and acquaintance with a variety of character. In those words..
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Virginia Woolf |
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5d693bb
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Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures--there's something sexual in it--that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can't write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. But I mu..
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Virginia Woolf |
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d201b32
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The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls unrecorded.
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Virginia Woolf |
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51404c9
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Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly ..
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time-passing
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Virginia Woolf |
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5dc82e0
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so now, Mrs. Ramsay thought, she could return to that dream land, that unreal but fascinating place, the Manning's drawing-room at Marlow twenty years ago; where one moved about without haste or anxiety, for there was no future to worry about. She knew what had happened to them, what to her. It was like reading a good book again, for she knew the end of that story, since it had happened twenty years ago, and life, which shot down even from ..
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Virginia Woolf |
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796267a
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He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence.
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mr-carmichael
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Virginia Woolf |
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20598fe
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I need someone whose mind falls like a chopper on a block; to whom the pitch of absurdity is sublime, and a shoestring adorable. To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?
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virginia-woolf
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Virginia Woolf |
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81bec11
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What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens. One holds every phrase, every scene to the light as one reads--for Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the..
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Virginia Woolf |
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cabd808
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I do think all good and evil comes from words. I have to tune myself into a good temper with something musical, and I run to a book as a child to its mother.
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Virginia Woolf |
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0d36b59
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Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.
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Virginia Woolf |
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5c4d17c
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For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.
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Virginia Woolf |
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558feff
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But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.
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Virginia Woolf |
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0dd6cf3
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And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. "About life, about death; about Mrs. Ramsay"--no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, fu..
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Virginia Woolf |
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9b00929
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The people we are most fond of are not good for us when we are ill.
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Virginia Woolf |
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6983cb1
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For the truth is (let her ignore it) that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
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Virginia Woolf |
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f85135a
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Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.
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Virginia Woolf |
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5e5136b
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I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.
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Virginia Woolf |
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f38a5b5
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Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.
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motherhood
mother
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Virginia Woolf |
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8e9e6ca
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Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. For I am by no means confining you to fiction. If you would please me - and ..
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Virginia Woolf |
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43933e3
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It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred...
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Virginia Woolf |
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e8d17a6
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a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
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Virginia Woolf |
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bdb4f16
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To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the think veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bend her head as if to let her pelt f jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked.
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Virginia Woolf |
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29ded1d
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She looked pale, mysterious, like a lily, drowned under water, he thought.
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Virginia Woolf |
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df1ac72
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The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.' That will be useful.
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mind
useful
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Virginia Woolf |
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b71c085
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women are so suspicious of any interest that has not some obvious motive behind it, so terribly accustomed to concealment and suppression, that they are off at the flicker of an eye turned observingly in their direction.
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Virginia Woolf |
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ad7a841
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Now to sum it up,' said Bernard. 'Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we do not know each other (though I met you once I think, on board a ship going to Africa), we can talk freely. The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it were possible, I would hand it you entire. I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of..
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life
conclusion
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Virginia Woolf |
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a7f46ea
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She fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea.
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Virginia Woolf |
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1576cc6
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It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.
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Virginia Woolf |
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02725f6
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It is equally vain," she thought, "for you to think you can protect me, or for me to think I can worship you. The light of truth beats upon us without shadow, and the light of truth is damnably unbecoming to us both."
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Virginia Woolf |
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3289b89
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The spring without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid out on fields wide-eyed and watchful and entirely careless of what was done or thought by the beholders.
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Virginia Woolf |
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d8cd258
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Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small. The stalks of flowers are thick as oak trees. Leaves are high as the domes of vast cathedrals. We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver.
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Virginia Woolf |
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7a3a13e
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What did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer.
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Virginia Woolf |
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67456d5
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The morning was hot, and the exercise of reading left her mind contracting and expanding like the main-spring of a clock, and the small noises of midday, which one can ascribe to no definite cause, in a regular rhythm. It was all very real, very big, very impersonal, and after a moment or two she began to raise her first finger and to let it fall on the arm of her chair so as to bring back to herself some consciousness of her own existence...
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Virginia Woolf |
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2f24899
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I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.
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Virginia Woolf |
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e00bad5
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For Love, to which we may now return, has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you cannot separate them. In this case, Orlando's love began her flight towards him with her white face turned, and her smooth and lovely body outwards. Neare..
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Virginia Woolf |
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41afb79
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the value of education is among the greatest of all human values...
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Virginia Woolf |