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59eb74f
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Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher's face and the butcher a poet's; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November, 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ..
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Virginia Woolf |
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3147f72
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Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.
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Virginia Woolf |
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9655eca
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Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.
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Virginia Woolf |
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1f0c709
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But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.
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Virginia Woolf |
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2d7b2ab
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Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these - 'Chloe liked Olivia...' Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.
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woman
virginia-woolf
gay
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Virginia Woolf |
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3639dd3
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One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it r..
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Virginia Woolf |
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e971579
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Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.
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reading
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Virginia Woolf |
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5ec1e49
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If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women...
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Virginia Woolf |
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0baf4ab
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I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.
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Virginia Woolf |
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cc1d895
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We're all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person's opinion of another person? One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn't know
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Virginia Woolf |
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e95963c
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I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.
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dreams
night
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Virginia Woolf |
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c0062ea
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Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly ..
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Virginia Woolf |
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75d1ffe
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But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal 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 on the timepiece of the mi..
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Virginia Woolf |
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67b4ea7
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It is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people...Think of things in themselves.
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Virginia Woolf |
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d6c9b06
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I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely.
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Virginia Woolf |
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97ddb1e
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Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
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Virginia Woolf |
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953d2ef
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It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.
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Virginia Woolf |
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2b765d4
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And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial." And these values are inevitably transferred ..
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war
literature
women
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Virginia Woolf |
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3275b38
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As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.
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Virginia Woolf |
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5b5970f
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I am drowning, my dear, in seas of fire.
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Virginia Woolf |
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3aa9d8e
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For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.
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time
life
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Virginia Woolf |
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64f7a69
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madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!" "I'm dead, sir!" she replied. A few minutes later, they became engaged." --
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Virginia Woolf |
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448c02b
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They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid-ocean, and see every detail of each others' faces, and hear whatever they chanced to say.
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the-voyage-out
woolf
virginia-woolf
novel
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Virginia Woolf |
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22badb2
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There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not. But, as I put down my glass I remember; I am engaged to be married. I am to dine with my friends tonight. I am Bernard.
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Virginia Woolf |
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29d212c
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for women live much more in the past...they attach themselves to places;
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Virginia Woolf |
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9b85f04
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For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.
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Virginia Woolf |
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fd38eeb
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Nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched her own pools and let that couple look after themselves. She crouched low down and touched the smooth rubber-like sea anemones, who were stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of the rock. Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, l..
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Virginia Woolf |
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8b898ca
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And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's..
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the-waves
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Virginia Woolf |
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2ab1698
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Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?
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Virginia Woolf |
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811a451
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They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.
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woman
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Virginia Woolf |
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55c0a70
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Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely.
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Virginia Woolf |
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d724735
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Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life--one scratched on the wall.
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limitations
life
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Virginia Woolf |
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5a2c2aa
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Marvelous are the innocent.
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Virginia Woolf |
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7758877
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When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook--a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
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writing-life
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Virginia Woolf |
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31897a7
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I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so w..
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Virginia Woolf |
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9cbb460
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Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.
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Virginia Woolf |
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4b6d017
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what she loved: life, London, this moment of June.
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Virginia Woolf |
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cd67cdf
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One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.
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Virginia Woolf |
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c325d2b
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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 laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they ..
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Virginia Woolf |
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1e3f3de
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But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the teashop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him- he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily...he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then- that he could not feel.
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Virginia Woolf |
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2e9cf8e
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After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is 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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9aa1264
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She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly's wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the..
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Virginia Woolf |
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c42c3ae
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She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust.
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Virginia Woolf |
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17dc5cb
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One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.
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writing
colour
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Virginia Woolf |