Virginia Woolf Quotes
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The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now— James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too.
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I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married
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Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.
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But I think I’m coloured by my own wishes, & experimental mood.
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If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?
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The mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions.
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Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
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But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.
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Now to sum it up,' said Bernard. 'Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we do not know each other (though I met you once I think, on board a ship going to Africa), we can talk freely. The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it were possible, I would hand it you entire. I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes. I would say, "Take it. This is my life.
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It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.
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Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.
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My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.
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Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.
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Nothing could be slow enough, nothing lasts too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Barton when they were all talking, to look at the sky; seen it between peoples shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep. She walked to the window.
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Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.
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I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
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more and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will.
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Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
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I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.
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As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
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And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.
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Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
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Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.
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One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.