Virginia Woolf Quotes
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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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Without self awareness we are as babies in the cradles.
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I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
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For nothing was simply one thing.
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Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.
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The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process.
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To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.
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Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself.
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Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
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Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.
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And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.
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When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
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One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.
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Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read; what I haven't read.
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The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpended the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a fingerprint of a shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.
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Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.
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I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
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Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.
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It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.
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You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.
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To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!
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For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.
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If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their sense. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. Humanity goes. Money making becomes so important that they must work by night as well as by day. Health goes. And so competitive do they become that they will not share their work with others though they have more themselves. What then remains of a human being who has lost sight, sound, and sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave.
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A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.