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fd5d0e1
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Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
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notoriety
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Virginia Woolf |
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dc90a80
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I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.
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spring
old
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Virginia Woolf |
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771a072
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But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.
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Virginia Woolf |
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15c970f
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What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.
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Virginia Woolf |
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fbfe690
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So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood, - by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die ..
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Virginia Woolf |
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8acda3d
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she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstacy in the air. Where to begin?--that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to t..
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Virginia Woolf |
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1f427bb
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When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.
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death
heart
grave
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Virginia Woolf |
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f2a054e
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Life stand still here.
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Virginia Woolf |
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6c29c70
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Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame
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Virginia Woolf |
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929db63
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I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.
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Virginia Woolf |
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3089d34
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What is meant by "reality"? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable--now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech--and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Someti..
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Virginia Woolf |
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3a06451
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She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!
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loneliness
satisfaction
sadness
happiness
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Virginia Woolf |
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4970eb8
|
By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
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life
truth
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Virginia Woolf |
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e494e7d
|
Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.
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Virginia Woolf |
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55216b4
|
There it was before her - life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleye..
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Virginia Woolf |
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337e4ff
|
Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.
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jane-austen
criticism
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Virginia Woolf |
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490eef5
|
She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable --- this interminable life.
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Virginia Woolf |
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2f07ee2
|
An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know. All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one sh..
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women
subjectivity
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Virginia Woolf |
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273aa38
|
All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.
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misandry
misogyny
sexism
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Virginia Woolf |
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70a0a22
|
Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.
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escape
mind
life
inspirational
|
Virginia Woolf |
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93dd5d0
|
For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
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Virginia Woolf |
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30ad932
|
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
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Virginia Woolf |
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c2a6150
|
To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.
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Virginia Woolf |
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7381654
|
Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?
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truth
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Virginia Woolf |
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63494aa
|
There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
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Virginia Woolf |
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a74f4c2
|
Yes, I deserve a spring-I owe nobody nothing.
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owe
nobody
nothing
virginia-woolf
spring
|
Virginia Woolf |
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78a695b
|
Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.
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Virginia Woolf |
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c7ea542
|
Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.
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fiction
women
on-fiction
problems
women-writers
gender
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Virginia Woolf |
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65b63fa
|
But when we sit together, close,' said Bernard, 'we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.
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union
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Virginia Woolf |
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24bce21
|
Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family..
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Virginia Woolf |
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0da3376
|
Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we--I mean all human beings--are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
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Virginia Woolf |
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99501fc
|
I prefer men to cauliflowers
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Virginia Woolf |
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aa0cdd6
|
All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.
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solitude
silence
seclusion
|
Virginia Woolf |
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e7b3dd6
|
Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.
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Virginia Woolf |
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9dccaa5
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Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having.
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Virginia Woolf |
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94aefbe
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There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, ..
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Virginia Woolf |
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9399d49
|
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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4227772
|
I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say "This is it"? My depression is a harassed feeling. I'm looking: but that's not it -- that's not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?"
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life
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Virginia Woolf |
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3d27ef9
|
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.
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Virginia Woolf |
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71a69b2
|
The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about ..
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words
library
literature
reading
freedom
|
Virginia Woolf |
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07012be
|
The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
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words
poetry
living
transience
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Virginia Woolf |
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a1d8465
|
I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?
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Virginia Woolf |
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b2a25d9
|
Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.
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Virginia Woolf |
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6d80a8a
|
To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.
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Virginia Woolf |