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5affb9f
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It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.
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Virginia Woolf |
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a0cfe00
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June was white. I see the fields white with daisies, and white with dresses; and tennis courts marked with white. Then there was wind and violent thunder. There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, "Consume me". That was at midsummer."
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Virginia Woolf |
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0e80d28
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They say that one must beat one's wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines
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Virginia Woolf |
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c19ac46
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It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.
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Virginia Woolf |
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b0c8053
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They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.]
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travel
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Virginia Woolf |
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c845141
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She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one.
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words
literature
reading
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Virginia Woolf |
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da63b76
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Life and a lover
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love
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Virginia Woolf |
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b087565
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For I hear music, they were saying. Music wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken. Look and listen.
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Virginia Woolf |
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7120a19
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He- for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it- was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.
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Virginia Woolf |
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d2721d7
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We insist, it seems, on living.
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Virginia Woolf |
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d16c946
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Sir William said he never spoke of 'madness'; he called it not having a sense of proportion.
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Virginia Woolf |
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a8d2c51
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To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions--there we have none.
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words
literature
reading
freedom
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Virginia Woolf |
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47c7526
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And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.
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Virginia Woolf |
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4ca4bf8
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For one's children so often gave one's own perceptions a little thrust forwards.
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Virginia Woolf |
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ba01c29
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That is my face,' said Rhoda, 'in the looking-glass behind Susan's shoulder - that is my face. But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughi..
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Virginia Woolf |
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b508825
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The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.
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weight
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Virginia Woolf |
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3617be2
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Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us. To gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to have - positively - a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang - there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes up pretty often.
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Virginia Woolf |
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1c87726
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I will achieve in my life - Heaven grant that it be not long - some gigantic amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to me. Out of my suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will enter.
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Virginia Woolf |
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b1b1ecd
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You wish to be a poet; you wish to be a lover. But the splendid clarity of your intelligence, and the remorseless honestly of your intellect bring you to a halt.
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Virginia Woolf |
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eda3d52
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Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions--trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday
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Virginia Woolf |
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5d4ccde
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I see the mountains in the sky; the great clouds; and the moon; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is "it"--it is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory, achieved. A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too: of the infinite oddity of the human position; with the moon up there and those mountain clouds."
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Virginia Woolf |
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9b19b26
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What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself- a voice answering a voice.
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Virginia Woolf |
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0ec89cd
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I, who am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement, make this mark, waiting for some winter's evening.
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Virginia Woolf |
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39ae2d7
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The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be, and deserves fuller investigation.
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Virginia Woolf |
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f61cfca
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No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine forever.Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race. It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. Grea..
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Virginia Woolf |
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1720dc3
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The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is through our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life...
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Virginia Woolf |
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fe55e81
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To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.
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Virginia Woolf |
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37f434e
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All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.
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Virginia Woolf |
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34c79d8
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She had influenced him more than any person he had ever known. And always in this way coming before him without his wishing it, cool, ladylike, critical; or ravishing, romantic.
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Virginia Woolf |
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366bd57
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But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn tr..
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Virginia Woolf |
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8f34fe3
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What a lark! What a plunge!
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Virginia Woolf |
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0742319
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What is nobler," she mused, turning over the photographs, "than to be a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty?"
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woman
inspirational
selflessness
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Virginia Woolf |
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17cd2e1
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How fast the stream flows from January to December!
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Virginia Woolf |
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be45060
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alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know
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freedom
joy
condemned
deserted
isolation
die
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Virginia Woolf |
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b4e61e7
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The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.
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Virginia Woolf |
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4422631
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and then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart.
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Virginia Woolf |
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7b790f8
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Big Ben struck the half hour. How extraordinary it was, strange, yes, touching, to see the old lady (they had been neighbors ever so many years) move away from the window, as if she were attached to that sound, that string. Gigantic as it was, it had something to do with her. Down, down, into the midst of ordinary things the finger fell making the moment solemn. She was forced, so Clarissa imagined, by that sound, to move, to go - but where..
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Virginia Woolf |
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dd22d23
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My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.
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Virginia Woolf |
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0bba324
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Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker's.
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Virginia Woolf |
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d97641a
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What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing t..
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Virginia Woolf |
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cba86f2
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Yet he too obsessed me for years. Until I wrote it out, I would find my lips moving; I would be arguing with him; raging against him; saying to myself all that I never said to him. How deep they drove themselves into me, the things it was impossible to say aloud.
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Virginia Woolf |
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347540c
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What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing t..
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Virginia Woolf |
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cab0b4e
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We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.
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Virginia Woolf |
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6771d8e
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Why, I ask, can I not finish the letter that I am writing? For my room is always scattered with unfinished letters. I begin to suspect, when I am with you, that I am among the most gifted of men. I am filled with the delight of youth, with potency, with the sense of what is to come. blundering, but fervid, I see myself buzzing round flowers, humming down scarlet cups, making blue funnels resound with my prodigious booming. How richly I shal..
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Virginia Woolf |