Quotes from Virginia Woolf

The depths of the sea are only water after all.

that beautiful voice which made everything she said sound like a caress

She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.

I should like to write four lines at a time, describing the same feeling, as a musician does; because it always seems to me that things are going on at so many different levels simultaneously.

Why, after all, did she do these things? Why seek pinnacles and stand drenched in fire? Might it consume her anyhow! Burn her to cinders!

but we should wrong these illustrious men very greatly if we insisted that they got nothing from these alliances but comfort, flattery and the pleasures of the body. What they got, it is obvious, was something that their own sex was unable to supply; and it would not be rash, perhaps, to define it further, without quoting the doubtless rhapsodical words of poets, as some stimulus; some renewal of creative power which is in the gift only of the opposite sex to bestow.

Evans, Evans! He Cried. Mrs. Smith was talking aloud to himself, Agnes the servant girl cries to Mrs. Filmer in the kitchen. Evans, Evans he had said as she brought in the tray. She jumped, she did. She scuttled downstairs.

Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her fore-runners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.

I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. I cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or mix with other people. —Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Harvest Books, January 1, 1978) Originally published October 1931.

Should I seek out some tree? Should I desert these form rooms and libraries, and the broad yellow page in which I read Catullus, for woods and fields? Should I walk under beech trees, or saunter along the river bank, where the trees meet united like lovers in the water? But nature is too vegetable, too vapid. She has only sublimities and vastitudes and water and leaves. I begin to wish for firelight, privacy, and the limbs of one person.

It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the train window as they left Newhaven, it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.

Los omóplatos de Rhoda casi se tocan, en el centro de la espalda, como las alas de una mariposa. Mientras contempla los números de tiza, su pensamiento se aloja en esos blancos círculos. Pasa a través de las alzadas blancas y penetra en el vacío sola. No tienen sentido para ella. Ni ella tiene respuesta para ellos. Rhoda no tiene cuerpo y los otros sí.

Ya no podía distinguir, allí en la colina, cuál era su casa. Todo parecía distante y tranquilo y extraño. La orilla parecía refinada, lejana, irreal. Ya la pequeña distancia que habían navegado los había alejado de ella y le había dado el aspecto cambiado, el aspecto sereno, de algo que retrocede y de lo que ya no se forma parte.

What ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness.

She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary.

But no; he did not like cabbages

Yazar, baÅŸkalar?n?n fikirlerine gösterdiÄŸi sayg? yüzünden kendi deÄŸerini deÄŸiÅŸtirmiÅŸti.

que una mujer necesita dinero y una habitación propia para dedicarse a la literatura;

He did not blame her; he blamed nothing, nobody; he saw the truth. He saw the dun-colored race of waters and the blank shore. But life is vigorous; the body lives, and the body, no doubt, dictated the reflection, which now urged him to movement, that one may cast away the forms of human beings, and yet retain the passion which seemed inseparable from their existence in the flesh.

For the philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy;

Una buena cena es de suma importancia para una buena conversación. No se puede pensar bien, amar bien, dormir bien, si no se ha cenado bien.

Ma Peter - non importa quanto fosse bella la giornata, e gli alberi e l'erba, e la fanciulla vestita di rosa - Peter non vedeva mai nulla. Se lei glielo chiedeva, si metteva gli occhiali; guardava. Ma era lo stato del mondo che gli interessava: Wagner, la poesia di Pope, il carattere della gente, e i difetti dell'anima di lei.

But here, none too soon, are the second-hand bookshops. Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being; here we balance ourselves after the splendours and miseries of the streets.

And as she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael was there or not, her mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space, while she modelled it with greens and blues.