Virginia Woolf Quotes
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My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.
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It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
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So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.
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I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.
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The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.
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So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood, - by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.
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Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.
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For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.” — Virginia Woolf, The Waves
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Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence
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The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
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There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.
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Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.
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So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.
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For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.
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When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.
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Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.
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Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
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Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
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The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.
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What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know ... I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.
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Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
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I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.
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Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.
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A light here required a shadow there.