Quotes About Virginia Woolf

there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination - over other people

Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes? when, thought Clarissa, that's the miracle, that's the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of drawers to dressing-table.

he truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.

There is a certain 'beauty' in illness - one is alone - one reads - one thinks - one sees only the people one like seeing. (27 (?)/5/1928) - From a Letter to Duncan Grant)

Woolf was breaking new ground in the way she rendered consciousness and her understanding of human subjectivity.

Dass eine berühmte Bibliothek von einer Frau verwünscht wird, ist für eine berühmte Bibliothek völlig bedeutungslos. Ehrwürdig und gelassen, mit all ihren Schätzen sicher an ihrem Busen verwahrt, schläft sie selbstzufrieden und wird, was mich angeht, für immer so weiterschlafen.

Perhaps, though, these words from her essay "How Should One Read a Book?" are our best guide: "The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

To follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one's pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things.

Me atrevería a decir que Anon, que escribió tantos poemas sin firmarlos, era una mujer.

It is ten years since Virginia Woolf published her last volume of collected essays, THE COMMON READER: SECOND SERIES. At the time of her death she was already engaged in getting together essays for a further volume, which she proposed to publish in the autumn of 1941 or the spring Of 1942. She also intended to publish a new book of short stories, including in it some or all of MONDAY OR TUESDAY, which has been long out of print. She left

She had a perfectly clear notion of what she wanted. Her emotions were all on the surface. Beneath, she was very shrewd—a far better judge of character than Sally, for instance, and with it all, purely feminine; with that extraordinary gift, that woman's gift, of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be.

The great revelation had never come. Instead there were daily little miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark, here was one.

I have found my mate,' she murmured. 'It is the moor. I am nature's bride.

How she had loved sound when she was a boy, and thought the volley of tumultuous syllables from the lips the finest of all poetry.

Virginia Woolf was a babe.' Of the many foolish things I said in graduate school, this is the one that haunts me the most. But I didn't regret it immediately.

In 1922 Woolf met the writer Vita Sackville-West, who was to join Vanessa Bell and Leonard Woolf as the most significant people in her life.

Leonard and Virginia married in August 1912. Virginia was 30. Soon after her marriage she suVered another breakdown and her mental health declined sporadically over the following year, culminating in a suicide attempt in September 1913. They were advised against having children because of Virginia's recurring depressive illness, a cause of some regret to her, and a point of much heated debate among her later biographers.

I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?

Virgina Woolf versus Edward Lear." "Christ Alive," said Billy. "Are those my only choices?" "I went for Lear," said Leon. "Partly out of fidelity to the letter L. Partly because given the choice between nonsense and boojy wittering you blatantly have to choose nonsense.

Katherine, who tried so hard in London to be best friends with Virginia Woolf, who hated her, because Katherine was the kind of naif-imbecile that the literary men adored and championed at her expense.

We can allow ourselves this 1920s picture of Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, dancing the Chicken Strut or the Memphis Shake together, with Leonard, pehaps, winding up the gramophone, after tea on a June afternoon.

Virginia Woolf, who was thirteen when her mother died, wrote, "Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face.

Elizabeth disliked the tragic, martyred image of Virginia Woolf which grew up after her death. When she read the first volume of William Plomer's autobiography, At Home, in 1958, she told him that 'only you seem to bring back Virginia's laughter - I get so bored and irked by the tragic fiction which has been manufactured about her since 1941.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.