Virginia Woolf Quotes
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Like all very handsome men who die tragically, he left not so much a character behind him as a legend. Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face.
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Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.
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I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
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... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bullyher, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
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Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
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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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Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
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The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass
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We insist, it seems, on living.
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and even a tea party means apprehension, breakage
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For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.
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People only become writers if they can't find the one book they've always wanted to read.
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I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.
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There is something I want-something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed.
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Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
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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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A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.
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Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.
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What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment.
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A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.
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All artists need a room of their own
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Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.
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First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
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Yes, yes, I'm coming. Right up the top of the house. One moment I'll linger. How the mud goes round in the mind-what a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts itself, and a gain through the eyes one sees clear and still, and there comes to the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those one nods to, the one never meets again.