Virginia Woolf

“In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.”

“Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.”

“He was careful to avoid meeting anyone. There was Stubbs, the gardener, coming along the path. He hid behind a tree till he had passed. He let himself out at a little gate in the garden wall. he skirted all stables, kennels, breweries, carpenters’ shops, wash-houses, places where they make tallow candles, kill oxen, forge horse-shoes, stitch jerkins – for the house was a town ringing with men at work at their various crafts – and gained the ferny path leading uphill through the park unseen. There is perhaps a kinship among qualities; one draws another along with it; and the biographer should here call attention to the fact that this clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude. Having stumbled over a chest, Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.”

“Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it? Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story.”

“He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess – he was a woman.”

“Life's what you see in people's eyes; life's what they learn, and, having learnt it, never, though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware of -- what? That life's like that, it seems.”

“Sir, I would trust you with my heart. Moreover, we have left our bodies in the banqueting hall. Those on the turf are the shadows of our souls.”

“Desiring truth, awaiting it, laboriously distilling a few words, forever desiring ---”

“What are you thinking of, Katharine?" he asked suspiciously, noticing her tone of dreaminess and the inapt words."I was thinking of you--yes, I swear it. Always of you, but you take such strange shapes in my mind. You've destroyed my loneliness. Am I to tell you how I see you? No, tell me--tell me from the beginning."Beginning with spasmodic words, he went on to speak more and more fluently, more and more passionately, feeling her leaning towards him, listening with wonder like a child, with gratitude like a woman. She interrupted him gravely now and then."But it was foolish to stand outside and look at the windows. Suppose William hadn't seen you. Would you have gone to bed?"He capped her reproof with wonderment that a woman of her age could have stood in Kingsway looking at the traffic until she forgot."But it was then I first knew I loved you!" she exclaimed."Tell me from the beginning," he begged her."No, I'm a person who can't tell things," she pleaded. "I shall say something ridiculous--something about flames--fires. No, I can't tell you."But he persuaded her into a broken statement, beautiful to him, charged with extreme excitement as she spoke of the dark red fire, and the smoke twined round it, making him feel that he had stepped over the threshold into the faintly lit vastness of another mind, stirring with shapes, so large, so dim, unveiling themselves only in flashes, and moving away again into the darkness, engulfed by it.”

“She held in her hands for one brief moment the globe which we spend our lives in trying to shape, round, whole, and entire from the confusion of chaos.”

“But he never looked at his daughter, and strode out of the room, leaving in the minds of the women a sense, half of awe, half of amusement, and the extravagant, inconsiderate, uncivilized male, outraged somehow and gone bellowing to his lair with a roar which still sometimes reverberates in the most polished of drawing rooms.”

“But she could not reduce her vision to words, since it was no single shape coloured upon the dark, but rather a general excitement, an atmosphere, which, when she tried to visualize it, took form as a wind scouring the flanks of the northern hills and flashing light upon cornfields and pools.”

“Have I never understood you, Katherine? Have I been very selfish?’ 'Yes ... You've asked her for sympathy, and she's not sympathetic; you've wanted her to be practical, and she's not practical.”

“Purposely, perhaps, Mary did not agree with Ralph; she loved to feel her mind in conflict with his, and to be certain that he spared her female judgement no ounce of his male muscularity.”

“Literature had taken possession even of her memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain characters in the old novels...”

“Life for most people compels the exercise of the lower gifts and wastes the precious ones, until it forces us to agree that there is little virtue, as well as little profit, in what once seemed to us the noblest part of our inheritance.”

“How was one to lasso her mind, and tether it to this minute, unimportant spot?”

“I always wish that you could marry everybody who wants to marry you.”

“Her pleasant brown eyes resembled Ralph's, save in expression, for whereas he seemed to look straightly and keenly at one object, she appeared to be in the habit of considering everything from many different points of view.”

“And so they would go on talking or rather, understanding, which has become the main art of speech in an age when words are growing daily so scanty in comparison with ideas that ‘the biscuits ran out’ has to stand for kissing a negress in the dark when one has just read Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy for the tenth time. (And from this it follows that only the most profound masters of style can tell the truth, and when one meets a simple one–syllable writer, one may conclude, without any doubt at all, that the poor man is lying.)”

“Night had come—night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day.”

“Oh, I am in love with life!”

“She felt as if things were moving past her as she lay stretched on the bed under the single sheet. But it’s not landscape any longer, she thought; it’s people’s lives, their changing lives.”

“And for some reason she held the sentence suspended without meaning in her mind’s ear, “…quite enough for everybody at present,” she repeated. After all the foreign languages she had been hearing, it sounded to her pure English. What a lovely language, she thought, saying over to herself again the common place words…”

“Love ought to stop on both sides, don’t you think, simultaneously?’ He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake the sleepers. ‘But it won’t - that’s the devil,’ he added in the same undertone.”

“She left the room without looking in the glass. From which we deduce the fact, he said to himself, as if he were writing a novel, that Miss Sarah Pargiter has never attracted the love of men. Or had she? He did not know. These little snapshot pictures of people left much to be desired, these little surface pictures that one made, like a fly crawling over a face, and feeling, here’s the nose, here’s the brow.”

“How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.”

“Es mucho más fácil matar a un fantasma que a una realidad.”

“Si no dices la verdad sobre ti mismo, difícilmente podrás decir la de las otras personas.”

“No se puede tener paz evitando la vida.”

“Los ojos de los otros, nuestras prisiones; sus pensamientos, nuestras jaulas.”

“In all the books love is one of the great facts that mould human life. But it is a catastrophe: it happens suddenly and overwhelmingly, and there is little to be said about it.”

“She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust.”

“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.”

“How could one express in words these emotions of the body? Express that emptiness there? It was one's body feeling, not one's mind. 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.”

“The impetuous creature--a pirate--started forward, sprang away; she had to hold the rail to steady herself, for a pirate it was, reckless, unscrupulous, bearing down ruthlessly, circumventing dangerously, boldly snatching a passenger, or ignoring a passenger, squeezing eel-like and arrogant in between, and then rushing insolently all sails spread up Whitehall.”

“For nothing was simply one thing.”

“He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line.”

“What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.”

“And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.”

“Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one!”

“Let us turn over the pages, and I will add, for your amusement, a comment in the margin.”

“He soon perceived, however, that the battles which Sir Miles and therest had waged against armed knights to win a kingdom, were not half soarduous as this which he now undertook to win immortality against theEnglish language. Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of compositionwill not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemedgood; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; wasin ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched atideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; actedhis people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; nowlaughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroicand pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then thefields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinestgenius or the greatest fool in the world.”

“It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.”

“One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.”

“It is the speed, the hot, molten effect, the lava flow of sentence into sentence that I need.”

“But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumns trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.”

“To upset everything every 3 or 4 years is my notion of a happy life.”

“... it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness.”

“I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.”