Virginia Woolf Quotes
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literature is the record of our discontent.
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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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The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.
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How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?
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Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.
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Consolation for those moments when you can't tell whether you're the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.
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A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.
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The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.
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Soup is cuisines kindest course
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For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens 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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I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.
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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 and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases.
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So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.
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No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes
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Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.
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Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
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Communication is truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty; to go down boldly and bring to light those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends to let them know it.
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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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But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.
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It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
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Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
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There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.
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[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
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Thinking is my fighting.