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fc68261
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And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
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fiction
virginia-woolf
modern-fiction
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Virginia Woolf |
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5d82eac
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The sky is blue,' he said, 'the grass is green.' Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. 'Upon my word,' he said [...], 'I don't see that one's more true than another. Both are utterly false.
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metaphor
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Virginia Woolf |
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447f864
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And the supreme mystery was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?
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religion
love
separateness
rooms
mystery
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Virginia Woolf |
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6cb51a1
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But she had nothing. She had forbidden music. Grating her fingers in the bark, she damned the audience. Panic seized her. Blood seemed to pour from her shoes. This is death, death, death, she noted in the margin of her mind; when illusion fails. Unable to lift her hand, she stood facing the audience. And then the shower fell, sudden, profuse. No one had seen the cloud coming. There it was, black, swollen, on top of them. Down it poured like..
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Virginia Woolf |
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6f1ea37
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All the same that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park...then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was! -- that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.
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Virginia Woolf |
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315b017
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There was nobody. Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pours over the outlines of houses and towers; bleak hillsides soften and fall in. But though they are gone, the night is full of them; robbed of colour, blank of windows, they exist more ponderously, give out what the frank daylight fails to transmit--the trouble and suspense of things conglomerated there..
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Virginia Woolf |
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ad44eb3
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How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another.
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Virginia Woolf |
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1d9f388
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She was singing] a senseless singsong, so that several park keepers looked at her with suspicion and were only brought to a favorable opinion of her sanity by noticing the pearl necklace she wore.
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Virginia Woolf |
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b0ec643
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In the 18th century we knew how everything was done, but here I rise through the air, I listen to voices in America, I see men flying- but how is it done? I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.
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Virginia Woolf |
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3bd9ae0
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I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.
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Virginia Woolf |
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b8aa5ab
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That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men.
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Virginia Woolf |
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44b323d
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Rhoda comes now, having slipped in while we were not looking. She must have made a tortuous course, taking cover now behind a waiter, now behind some ornamental pillar, so as to put off as long as possible the shock of recognition, so as to be secure for one more moment to rock her petals in her basin. We wake her. We torture her. She dreads us, she despises us, yet she comes cringing to our sides because for al our cruelty there is always ..
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Virginia Woolf |
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2059c6f
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Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth.
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Virginia Woolf |
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33070a6
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The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?
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Virginia Woolf |
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7ba6c78
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So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing
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Virginia Woolf |
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2490948
|
At one moment we deplore our birth and state and aspire to an ascetic exaltation; the next we are overcome by the smell of some old garden path and weep to hear the thrushes sing.
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Virginia Woolf |
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f7da26c
|
But he could not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words.)
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humour
love
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Virginia Woolf |
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c4f7a59
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Do you remember the lake?' she said, in an abrupt voice, under the pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of her throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said 'lake.' For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them grew larger and larger in her a..
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Virginia Woolf |
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44533ab
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Yet it is true that there was an absent mindedness about her which sometimes made her clumsy; she was apt to think of poetry when she should have been thinking of taffeta; her walk was a little too much of a stride for a woman, perhaps, and her gestures, being abrupt, might endanger a cup of tea on occasion.
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Virginia Woolf |
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e7ede91
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I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge.
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Virginia Woolf |
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992e0d3
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Twice Flush had done his utmost to kill his enemy; twice he had failed. And why had he failed, he asked himself? Because he loved Miss Barrett. Looking up at her from under his eyebrows as she lay, severe and silent on the sofa, he knew that he must love her for ever. Things are not simple but complex. If he bit Mr. Browning he bit her too. Hatred is not hatred; hatred is also love.
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Virginia Woolf |
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5760945
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There was a serenity about him always that had the look of innocence, when, technically, the word was no longer applicable.
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Virginia Woolf |
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8841c70
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As for describing the smell of a spaniel mixed with the smell of torches, laurels, incense, banners, wax candles and a garland of rose leaves crushed by a satin heel that has been laid up in camphor, perhaps Shakespeare, had he paused in the middle of writing Antony and Cleopatra -- But Shakespeare did not pause. Confessing our inadequacy, then, we can but note that to Flush Italy, in these the fullest, the freest, the happiest years of his..
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Virginia Woolf |
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00eff59
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The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if they had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought --to call it by a prouder name than it deserved-- had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds,..
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inspiration
ideas
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Virginia Woolf |
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c87e443
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It proves that one's life is not confined to one's body and what one says or does; one is living all the time in relation to certain background rods or conceptions. Mine is that there is a pattern hid behind the cotton wool. And this conception affects me every day. I prove this, now, by spending the morning writing, when I might be walking, running a shop, or learning to do something that will be useful if war comes. I feel that by writing..
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Virginia Woolf |
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342d18b
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At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial - and any question about sex is that - one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.
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Virginia Woolf |
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a505aee
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When you are silent you are again beautiful.
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silence
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Virginia Woolf |
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e7a5cc2
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Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on ..
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Virginia Woolf |
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70eca17
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Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people - what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassines..
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Virginia Woolf |
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a2c0764
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Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time's clock with one blow. Come closer.
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time
neville
the-waves
virginia-woolf
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Virginia Woolf |
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f50c1c8
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I've just stopped talking to you. It seems so strange. It's perfectly peaceful here--they're playing bowls--I'd just put flowers in your room. And there you sit with the bombs falling around you. What can one say-- except that I love you and I've got to live through this strange quiet evening thinking of you sitting there alone. Dearest-- let me have a line... You have given me such happiness...
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vita-sackville-west
virginia-woolf
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Virginia Woolf |
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7a3dc38
|
before parting that night we agreed that the objects of life were to produce good people and good books.
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Virginia Woolf |
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24fb8ad
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As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. Where there is nothing, Peter Walsh said to himself; feeling hollowed out, utterly empty within. Clarissa refused me, he thought. He stood there thinking, Clarissa refused me.
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Virginia Woolf |
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e68f685
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Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice.
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Virginia Woolf |
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b39c0c3
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Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English!
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Virginia Woolf |
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c546a78
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She felt drawing further from her and further from her an Archduke, (she did not mind that) a fortune, (she did not mind that) the safety and circumstance of married life, (she did not mind that) but life she heard going from her, and a lover.
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Virginia Woolf |
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2dd63fb
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Let us go, then, exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring the plum blossom and the bee.
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Virginia Woolf |
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0d6e320
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What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included.
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expansion
fissure
exclusion
harmony
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Virginia Woolf |
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08ca5a3
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Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.
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Virginia Woolf |
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98fc3ab
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I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and butter
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human-mind
talents-and-gifts
talents
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Virginia Woolf |
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720e45f
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You have been reading Byron. You have been marking the passages that seem to approve of your own character. I find marks against all those sentences which seem to express a sardonic yet passionate nature; a moth-like impetuosity dashing itself against hard glass. You thought, as you drew your pencil there, "I too throw off my cloak like that. I too snap my fingers in the face of destiny". Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot..
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Virginia Woolf |
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c5f8aac
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Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole--they see all sorts of things--they see themselves...
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Virginia Woolf |
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1c98411
|
Let us turn over the pages, and I will add, for your amusement, a comment in the margin.
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Virginia Woolf |
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e18d5bb
|
Indeed my aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky.
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Virginia Woolf |