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eb776dd
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A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
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Virginia Woolf |
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c2a01e1
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She was a fly, but the others were dragonflies, butterflies, beautiful insects, dancing, fluttering, skimming, while she alone dragged herself up out of the saucer.
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Virginia Woolf |
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123fde4
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I want to dance, laugh, eat pink cakes, yellow cakes, drink thin, sharp wine. Or an indecent story, now - I could relish that. The older one grows the more one likes indecency.
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Virginia Woolf |
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e1a6028
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She saw the light again. With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one's relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver f..
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Virginia Woolf |
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ba383db
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I'm not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.
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Virginia Woolf |
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ca00e9f
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Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels
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Virginia Woolf |
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652dd01
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Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price. Life for both sexes--and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement--is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for g..
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Virginia Woolf |
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163b5f0
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With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes -- one of the tragedies of married life.
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Virginia Woolf |
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18b0bf8
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It partook ... of eternity ... there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.
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peace
nostalgia
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Virginia Woolf |
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8038143
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Must, must, must -- detestable word. Once more, I who had thought myself immune, who had said, "Now I am rid of all that", find that the wave has tumbled me over, head over heels, scattering my possessions, leaving me to collect, to assemble, to head together, to summon my forces, rise and confront the enemy."
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virginia-woolf
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Virginia Woolf |
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4fe6ad9
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But if sleep it was, of what nature, we can scarcely refrain from asking, are such sleeps as these? Are they remedial measures--trances in which the most galling memories, events that seem likely to cripple life for ever, are brushed with a dark wing which rubs their harshness off and gilds them, even the ugliest, and basest, with a lustre, an incandescence? Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it ..
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Virginia Woolf |
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1d38331
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When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless... Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless.
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Virginia Woolf |
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bb4edc8
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In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether they were beggars or people of substance.
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Virginia Woolf |
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a331d50
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Despairing of human relationships (people were so difficult), she often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her.
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Virginia Woolf |
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ba28596
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For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The curio..
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Virginia Woolf |
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f3d9182
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Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she did not think of tears at first) which, without disturbing the firmness of her lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks. She had perfect control of herself-Oh, yes!-in every other way.
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shock
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Virginia Woolf |
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452331b
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I've cared for heaps of people, but not to marry them' she said. 'I suppose I'm too fastidious. all my life I've wanted somebody I could look up to, somebody great and big and splendid. Most men are so small.' 'What d;you mean by splendid?' Hewet asked. 'People are-nothing more.
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Virginia Woolf |
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098e46f
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The words (she was looking at the window) sounded as if they were floating like flowers on water out there, cut off from them all, as if no one had said them, but they had come into existence of themselves. "And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves." She did not know what they meant, but, like music, the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside her self, saying quite easily and..
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Virginia Woolf |
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e73cc70
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His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at their feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.
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self-pity
self-preservation
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Virginia Woolf |
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e895589
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The questions that we have to ask and to answer about that procession during this moment of transition are so important that they may well change the lives of men and women forever. For we have to ask ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that procession, or don't we? On what terms shall we join that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men?...Let us never cease from thinking--what is this "civilis..
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feminism
women
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Virginia Woolf |
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656b829
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Yet she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreathes heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile and inhumane than love; yet it is also absolutely beautiful and necessary.
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relationships
life
love
to-the-lighthouse
modernism
virginia-woolf
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Virginia Woolf |
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206b255
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Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magni..
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Virginia Woolf |
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d95948f
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Why then did she do it? She looked at the canvas, lightly scored with running lines. It would be hung in the servants' bedrooms. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa. What was the good of doing it then, and she heard some voice saying she couldn't paint, saying she couldn't create, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words withou..
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Virginia Woolf |
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cff3112
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The root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.
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Virginia Woolf |
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0761b1f
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For in marriage a little licence,a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him.
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Virginia Woolf |
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a163369
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He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship -- it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed fill..
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Virginia Woolf |
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bd9d77b
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With a brain working and a body working one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was conscious of being.
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Virginia Woolf |
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d75b3d7
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She held in her hands for one brief moment the globe which we spend our lives in trying to shape, round, whole, and entire from the confusion of chaos.
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Virginia Woolf |
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3b0abdb
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Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?
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Virginia Woolf |
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73e051e
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All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age ... when the writer used both sides of his mind [the male and female sides of his mind] equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton..
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shakespeare
mind
writing
keats
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Virginia Woolf |
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8c086c2
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This I say is the present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are attached.
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present-moment
monster
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Virginia Woolf |
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9d156af
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Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control.
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Virginia Woolf |
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199194e
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It was some such feeling of completeness perhaps which, ten years ago, standing almost where she stood now, had made her say that she must be in love with the place. Love had a thousand shapes. There might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one of those globed compact..
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Virginia Woolf |
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10b440c
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There is a sadness at the back of life which some people do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure.
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Virginia Woolf |
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c742329
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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 some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an* other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment ..
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Virginia Woolf |
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5abffd2
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Let me now raise my song of glory. Heaven be praised for solitude. Let me be alone. Let me cast and throw away this veil of being, this cloud that changes with the least breath, night and day, and all night and all day. While I sat here I have been changing. I have watched the sky change. I have seen clouds cover the stars, then free the stars, then cover the stars again. Now I look at their changing no more. Now no one sees me and I change..
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Virginia Woolf |
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8875b26
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Buy for me from the King's own kennels, the finest elk hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring them back without delay. For," he murmured, scarcely above his breath as he turned to his books, "I have done with men."
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dogs
men
humanity
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Virginia Woolf |
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94b8558
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When two people have been married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other's bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness.
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Virginia Woolf |
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44ca038
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It is remarkable...what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about.
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Virginia Woolf |
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0292259
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Literature had taken possession even of her memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain characters in the old novels...
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Virginia Woolf |
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8f36116
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Books - books - books," said Helen, in her absent-minded way. "More new books - I wonder what you find in them..."
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Virginia Woolf |
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7510c15
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Pray heaven that the inside of my mind may not be exposed
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Virginia Woolf |
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903392e
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So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying 'that is all' more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too 'that is all'. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall.
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Virginia Woolf |
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82e95b9
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And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system, so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past.
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Virginia Woolf |