Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf, known professionally as Virginia Woolf, was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 January 1882
CityLondon, England
butterfly shade lasts
The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom.
beautiful butterfly wings
...the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.
book butterfly discovery
For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone. "What is it to be in love?" she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea. Hypnotized by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew away, she rose, and within, her two books beneath her arm returned again, much as a soldier prepares for battle.
altering aspect believe forever hence
These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
book heart known leaves past shut title
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title
beyond literature minded opinion others reason strewn
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others
effort mind
They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort.
adventure thinking attachment
For now she need not think of anybody. She coud be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.
adventure goat trembling wild
If we didn't live adventurously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.
casual dusty found group lights meant newspaper reality room saying scrap seem stamps
What is meant by ''reality''? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying
confidence generate inferior invaluable people thinking
Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradles. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.
centuries delicious figure glasses looking magic natural power reflecting served size twice women
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man, at twice its natural size
british-author caught heart heat measure shall tangled violence
Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
beauty british-author cutting heart laughter
The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.