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
morning solitude looks
...solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen. *** Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again.
morning lying self
I was lying in bed this morning and saying to myself, 'the remarkable thing about Ethel is her stupendous self-satisfaction' when in came your letter to confirm this profound psychological observation. How delighted I was!
morning writing tired
To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.
morning simple sight
Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than any words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.
notebook morning exercise
A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psycho-analysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there? Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom--all these emotions I could trace and name as they succeeded each other throughout the morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes, said the sketch, anger had.
morning wind sea
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.
morning years sight
For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.
beauty british-author cutting heart laughter
The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
convenient somebody term
I' is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.
british-author english-poet feeble force seems
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
phantom
It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.
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
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
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.