Virginia Woolf: Trending quotes (page 13)

“To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.”

Virginia Woolf

People , Soul , Indifference

“for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Part I, Ch. 9
Source: To the Lighthouse (1927)
Context: Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscription on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay's knee.

Men , Knowledge

“Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

Truth

“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.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

Children , World , Way , Suffering

“First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

Music

“Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.”

Virginia Woolf book Jacob's Room

Source: Jacob's Room

Happiness

“Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

"Modern Fiction"
The Common Reader (1925)
Context: Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

Life

“No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse