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af67c95
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I like observing people. I like looking at things.
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Virginia Woolf |
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d49b0dd
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He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unanswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. I shall propose meeting - under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait, and he will not come. It is for that that I love him. Oblivious, almost entirely ignorant, he will pass from my life. And I shall pass, incredible as it seems, into other li..
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Virginia Woolf |
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d324bb5
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And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect, thought Clarissa, watching him open the door; for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from one's husband, without losing one's independence, one's self-respect--something, after all, priceless.
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Virginia Woolf |
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22d9fbe
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To sit and contemplate - to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are.
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meaning-of-life
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Virginia Woolf |
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d6d4386
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The human frame being what it is, heart, body, and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well
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Virginia Woolf |
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7ff65e0
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The journey is everything. Most necessary of all, but rarest good fortune, we should try to find some man of our own sort who will go with us and to whom we can say the first thing that comes into our heads. For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.
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love
journeys
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Virginia Woolf |
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c1070d8
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One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in it.
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places
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Virginia Woolf |
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f31465c
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It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.
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Virginia Woolf |
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88af0f4
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It is strange that we, who are capable of so much suffering, should inflict so much suffering.
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Virginia Woolf |
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8f32a6d
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there was only the sound of the sea.
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virginia-woolf
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Virginia Woolf |
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05f9f25
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For nothing [...] is more heavenly than to resist and to yield; to yield and to resist.
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yield
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Virginia Woolf |
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b7ebaac
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I love tremendous and sonorous words.
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Virginia Woolf |
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adc8cfb
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Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life?
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living
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Virginia Woolf |
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487969d
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Women made civilisation impossible with all their "charm " all their silliness."
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Virginia Woolf |
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2631b3d
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He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.
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Virginia Woolf |
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c71880a
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Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of darkness.
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Virginia Woolf |
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24dce5d
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I belong to quick, futile moments of intense feeling. Yes, I belong to moments. Not to people.
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Virginia Woolf |
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d8c5885
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Words... are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind....Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them,..
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Virginia Woolf |
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3f01d6a
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For there she was.
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Virginia Woolf |
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5a326f9
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Love ought to stop on both sides, don't you think, simultaneously?' He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake the sleepers. 'But it won't - that's the devil,' he added in the same undertone.
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Virginia Woolf |
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6d9046b
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O friendship, how piercing are your darts - there, there, again there.
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Virginia Woolf |
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bca78db
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How could any Lord have made this world?... there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for this world to commit... No happiness lasted.
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christianity
god
skepticism
lord
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Virginia Woolf |
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76d8bc3
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Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder. Therefore -- since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what Orlando is doing now -- there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar, tell one's beads, bl..
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writing
d
h-lawrence
intellectualism
sexism
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Virginia Woolf |
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4dd3b70
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Ah well, so be it. The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent's Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained -- at last! -- the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence -- the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.
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Virginia Woolf |
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44b51fa
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It was a great mistake to have come. He should have stayed at home and read his book, thought Peter Walsh; should have gone to a music hall; he should have stayed at home, for he knew no one.
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reading
introvert
party
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Virginia Woolf |
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70d83a9
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For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited
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joseph-conrad
duality
writing-craft
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Virginia Woolf |
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56b4505
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Ah, but thinking became morbid, sentimental, directly one began conjuring up doctors, dead bodies; a little glow of pleasure, a sort of lust, too, over the visual impression warned one not to go on with that sort of thing any more - fatal to art, fatal to friendship. True. And yet, thought Peter Walsh, as the ambulance turned the corner, though the light high bell could be heard down the next street and still farther as it crossed the Totte..
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Virginia Woolf |
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265c849
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The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figu..
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Virginia Woolf |
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49e509b
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George Eliot makes us share their lives, not in a spirit of condescension or of curiosity, but in a spirit of sympathy. She is no satirist....But she gathers in her large grasp a great bunch of the main elements of human nature and groups them loosely together with a tolerant understanding which, as one finds upon re-reading, has not only kept her figures fresh and free, but has given them an unexpected hold upon our laughter and tears.
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Virginia Woolf |
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dfe5b60
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When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontes and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow, some witticisms if possible about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs Gaskell and one would have done.
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Virginia Woolf |
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2b80b7f
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When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.
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Virginia Woolf |
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66c630d
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Como uma nuvem que atravessa o sol, o silencio caiu sobre Londres, e caiu sobre o espirito. Todo esforco e findo. Pende o tempo, do mastro. Rigido, somente o esqueleto do habito sustenta a forma humana. E onde nao ha nada, disse Peter Walsh a si mesmo; o sentimento escava-se, oco, completamente oco. Clarissa recusou-me, pensou. E ali ficou parado, a pensar: Clarissa recusou-me.
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Virginia Woolf |
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85a6a2a
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Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex--woman, that is to say--also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women.
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Virginia Woolf |
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7e931f0
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But she's extraordinarily attractive, he thought, as, walking across Trafalgar Square in the direction of the Haymarket, came a young woman who, as she passed Gordon's statue, seemed, Peter Walsh thought (susceptible as he was), to shed veil after veil, until she became the very woman he had always had in mind; young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting.
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Virginia Woolf |
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ca49ba0
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ON 26 July 1926, Vita Sackville-West gave the Woolfs a cocker spaniel puppy which they named Pinka (or Pinker). She ate holes in Virginia's skirt and devoured Leonard's proofs. "But", writes Virginia, "she is an angel of light. Leonard says seriously she makes him believe in God . . . and this after she has wetted his floor 8 times in one day". For nine years Pinka was the much loved companion of both Leonard and Virginia, though in time sh..
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Virginia Woolf |
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fefc785
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A light here required a shadow there.
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Virginia Woolf |
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4640979
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For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.
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Virginia Woolf |
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f1a4259
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Directly the mulberry tree begins to make you circle, break off. Pelt the tree with laughter.
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Virginia Woolf |
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722d68b
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The flowers flashed before they faded. She watched them flash.
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Virginia Woolf |
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a83a2b9
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The artist after all is a solitary being.
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Virginia Woolf |
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8b4087b
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If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
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Virginia Woolf |
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452b70d
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That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
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Virginia Woolf |