Virginia Woolf Quotes
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It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.
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Do not move, do not go. Sink within this moment. Hold it for ever.
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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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madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!" "I'm dead, sir!" she replied. A few minutes later, they became engaged.
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Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
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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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I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.
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Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.
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Well, we must wait for the future to show.
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The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
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I have had my vision.
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I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.
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For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.
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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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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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It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.
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It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.
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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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As nobody can possibly tell me whether one's writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one's own pleasure. I am sure of that.
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I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
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But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.
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Oh, I am in love with life!
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But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the teashop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him- he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily…he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then- that he could not feel.
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Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes.