Virginia Woolf Quotes
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Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than any words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.
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Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes. Virginia Woolf
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They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort.
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Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.
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We read Charlotte Bronte not for exquisite observation of character - her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy - hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life - hers is that of a country parson's daughter; but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt.
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I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
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Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the
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Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above.
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Intimacy is a difficult art.
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If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?
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I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
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To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?
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We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.
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for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge
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I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.
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The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.
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All extremes of feeling are allied to madness.
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It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
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Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.
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Fear no more, says the heart.
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Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.
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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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To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action.
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Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.