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57e666b
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At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever
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Virginia Woolf |
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779d1d1
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It was love, she thought, love that never clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of human gain. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific pro..
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love
men-and-women
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Virginia Woolf |
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cb689a9
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You're the only person I've ever met who seems to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say a thing.
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Virginia Woolf |
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5b3fd7b
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But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.
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Virginia Woolf |
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8f7c4b3
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Consider how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we ..
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Virginia Woolf |
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ee42ee9
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I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.
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sentences
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Virginia Woolf |
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d9ba4a0
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Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades..
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Virginia Woolf |
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81d8b85
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I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.
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Virginia Woolf |
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1648614
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For nothing was simply one thing.
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Virginia Woolf |
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569e8d5
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In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.
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Virginia Woolf |
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985d55a
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What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat yourselves down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into the waste-paper basket with your greasy paws. Yet those were my life.
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Virginia Woolf |
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93192e0
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Oh, I am in love with life!
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Virginia Woolf |
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00920fe
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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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lgbt
sexuality
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Virginia Woolf |
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7d4eb3f
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The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.
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Virginia Woolf |
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5eb285d
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I think sometimes I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn.
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Virginia Woolf |
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c4d7150
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a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.
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Virginia Woolf |
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8e48992
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Submit to me." So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore, wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen alseep, she thought; were free like smoke, were free to come and go like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought."
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Virginia Woolf |
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bf5b6a0
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I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart.
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words
literature
reading
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Virginia Woolf |
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dba6a7d
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Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!
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religion
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Virginia Woolf |
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a9929dd
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I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances an..
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Virginia Woolf |
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4e446d9
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Lord, how unutterably disgusting life is! What dirty tricks it plays us, one moment free; the next, this. Here we are among the breadcrumbs and the stained napkins again. That knife is already congealing with grease. Disorder, sordidity and corruption surrounds us. We have been taking into our mouths the bodies of dead birds. It is with these greasy crumbs, slobbering over napkins, and little corpses that we have to build. Always it begins ..
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virginia-woolf
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Virginia Woolf |
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d153ca5
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Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping.
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Virginia Woolf |
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c12d7f6
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We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.
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silence
death
life
thought
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Virginia Woolf |
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07490d7
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Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?"
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truth
semblance
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Virginia Woolf |
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9771f6c
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Would there be trees if we didn't see them?
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Virginia Woolf |
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0a45e73
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One must love everything.
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love
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Virginia Woolf |
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5538350
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When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre
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Virginia Woolf |
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5fa5326
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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.
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Virginia Woolf |
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3dfb8f3
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He sighed profoundly, and flung himself - there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word - on the earth at the foot of the oak tree. 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 ..
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summer
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Virginia Woolf |
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074f8ff
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I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.
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Virginia Woolf |
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b8b75bd
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Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.
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Virginia Woolf |
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06afaaf
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Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.
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Virginia Woolf |
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365c9d7
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Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.
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Virginia Woolf |
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8a7d4c3
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Come along,' she said. 'They're waiting.' He had never felt so happy in the whole of his life! Without a word they made it up. They walked down to the lake. He had twenty minutes of perfect happiness. Her voice, her laugh, her dress (something floating, white, crimson), her spirit, her adventurousness; she made them all disembark and explore the island; she startled a hen; she laughed; she sang. And all the time, he knew perfectly well, Dal..
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Virginia Woolf |
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fa12d3a
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Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.
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Virginia Woolf |
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ddc9f39
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Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame
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Virginia Woolf |
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12c293f
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For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone. "What is it to be in love?" she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea. Hypnotized by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew away, she rose..
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Virginia Woolf |
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dbf756d
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For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may have many thousand...and these selves of which we are built up, one on top of the other, as plates are piled on a waiter's hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own... so that one will..
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life
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Virginia Woolf |
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85c5abc
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Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the center which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
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Virginia Woolf |
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8a0bc54
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For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, "This is what I have made of it! This!" And what had she made of it? What, indeed?" --
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Virginia Woolf |
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a084a80
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The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.
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writer
novelist
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Virginia Woolf |
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20cb403
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A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
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writing
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Virginia Woolf |
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23b8f4c
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Night had come--night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day.
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Virginia Woolf |
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b1a0cf2
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There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death...
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Virginia Woolf |