Virginia Woolf: Citations en anglais

Virginia Woolf était femme de lettres britannique. Citations en anglais.

Virginia Woolf: 443 citations0 J'aime

“Mrs Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren't things spoilt then, Mrs Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silence by her side) by saying them?”

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Virginia Woolf livre To the Lighthouse

Part III, Ch. 5
To the Lighthouse (1927)

“No one can escape the power of language, let alone those of English birth brought up from childhood, as Mrs. Hilbery had been, to disport themselves now in the Saxon plainness, now in the Latin splendor of the tongue, and stored with memories, as she was, of old poets exuberating in an infinity of vocables. Even Katharine was slightly affected against her better judgment by her mother's enthusiasm. Not that her judgment could altogether acquiesce in the necessity for a study of Shakespeare's sonnets as a preliminary to the fifth chapter of her grandfather's biography. Beginning with a perfectly frivolous jest, Mrs. Hilbery had evolved a theory that Anne Hathaway had a way, among other things, of writing Shakespeare's sonnets; the idea, struck out to enliven a party of professors, who forwarded a number of privately printed manuals within the next few days for her instruction, had submerged her in a flood of Elizabethan literature; she had come half to believe in her joke, which was, she said, at least as good as other people's facts, and all her fancy for the time being centered upon Stratford-on-Avon.”

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Virginia Woolf livre Night and Day

Source: Night and Day (1919), Ch. 24

“Dearest,
I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that.
But I know that I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life. It is this madness. Nothing anyone says can persuade me. You can work, and you will be much better without me. You see I can't write this even, which shows I am right. All I want to say is that until this disease came on we were perfectly happy. It was all due to you. No one could have been so good as you have been, from the very first day till now. Everyone knows that.
V.”

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Letter to Leonard Woolf (28 March 1941), from The Virginia Woolf Reader (1984) edited by Mitchell A. Leaska, p. 369, ISBN 0156935902

“The flowers flashed before they faded. She watched them flash.”

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Virginia Woolf livre Between the Acts

Between the Acts (1941)

“I must try to set aside half an hour in some part of my day, and consecrate it to diary writing. Give it a name and a place, and then perhaps, such is the human mind, I shall come to think it a duty, and disregard other duties for it.”

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Wednesday 8 April 1925
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

“I will use these last pages to sum up our circumstances. A map of the world. […]
I seldom see Lytton; that is true. The reason is that we don't fit in, I imagine, to his parties nor he to ours; but that if we can meet in solitude, all goes as usual. Yet what do one's friends mean to one, if one only sees them eight times a year? […]
I use my friends rather as giglamps: there's another field I see; by your light. Over there's a hill. I widen my landscape.”

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Tuesday 2 September, 1930
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

“Mrs Swithin took her knitting from the table. 'Did you feel,' she asked, 'what he said: we act different parts but are the same?'
'Yes,' Isa answered. 'No,' she added. It was Yes, No. Yes, yes, yes, the tide rushed out embracing. No, no, no, it contracted.”

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Virginia Woolf livre Between the Acts

Between the Acts (1941)

“Happily, at forty-six I still feel as experimental and on the verge of getting at the truth as ever.”

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Saturday 21 April, 1929
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

“She had done the usual trick – been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr Bankes) were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere.”

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Virginia Woolf livre To the Lighthouse

Part I, Ch. 17
To the Lighthouse (1927)

“A light here required a shadow there.”

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Virginia Woolf livre To the Lighthouse

Part I, Ch. 9
To the Lighthouse (1927)

“Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.”

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Virginia Woolf A Letter to a Young Poet

"A Letter to a Young Poet"
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)

“The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible.”

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Essay "Lewis Carroll" (1939); reprinted in The Moment, and Other Essays (1948)

“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

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Virginia Woolf livre A Room of One's Own

Ch. 3 http://books.google.com/books?id=HSRFAAAAYAAJ&q=%22It+is+the+nature+of+the+artist+to+mind+excessively+what+is+said+about+him+Literature+is+strewn+with+the+wreckage+of+men+who+have+minded+beyond+reason+the+opinions+of+others%22&pg=PA98#v=onepage <br class="br">A Room of One's Own (1929)

“But look — he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gesture one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime.”

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Virginia Woolf livre Les Vagues

Source: The Waves (1931), p. 30

“Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it — the poets and novelists — can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does no exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma — a mirage.”

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Virginia Woolf livre Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 4

“Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.”

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26 July 1922
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

“But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets.”

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Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

"How It Strikes a Contemporary"
The Common Reader (1925)

“Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death… others through sheer inability to cross the street.”

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Virginia Woolf livre Les Vagues

Source: The Waves (1931), p. 186

“Directly the mulberry tree begins to make you circle, break off. Pelt the tree with laughter.”

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Virginia Woolf livre Three Guineas

Source: Three Guineas (1938), Ch. 2, p. 80

“While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace.”

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Virginia Woolf livre Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 2