Eloquent, profoundly melancholic, intelligent and deeply wise, sentimental and provocative yet always raw in terms of emotion, Virginia Woolf was a woman entirely ahead of her time. This is made with much love and respect in her memory.
Oh the torture of never being left alone! I find it impossible to disentangle myself from those instincts, affections, passions, attachments…which bound me…from the first moment of consciousness to other people. I need solitude; I need to feel I belong to myself. I now begin to think that reading has become my secret life and personal refuge.
Virginia Woolf, Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897 - 1909 (via violentwavesofemotion)
- ? Jan 10th 2013
Should I seek out some tree? Should I desert these form rooms and libraries, and the broad yellow page in which I read Catullus, for woods and fields? Should I walk under beech trees, or saunter along the river bank, where the trees meet united like lovers in the water? But nature is too vegetable, too vapid. She has only sublimities and vastitudes and water and leaves. I begin to wish for firelight, privacy, and the limbs of one person.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (via arosary)
(via violentwavesofemotion)
- ? Nov 19th 2012
Activity of mind, I think, is the only thing that keeps one’s life going, unless one has a larger emotional activity of some other kind. One’s mind that’s like a restless steamer paddle urging the ship along, tho’ the wind is non-existent and the sea is as still as glass. What a force a human being is! There are worse solitudes than drift ice, and yet this eternal throbbing heat and energy of one’s mind thaws a pathway through; and open sea and land shall come in time. Think though, what man is midst fields and woods. A solitary creature dependent on winds and tides, and yet somehow suppressing the might of a spark in his brain. What nonsense to write!
Virginia Woolf, The Early Journals, 1897 - 1909. (via violentwavesofemotion)
- ? Nov 17th 2012
She was beautiful and silent, with downcast eyes. She sat musing, pondering, that day. Her eyes were bent. She would never lift them.
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
- ? Nov 13th 2012
What with the silence, and the possibility of walking out, at any moment over long wonderfully coloured roads to cliffs with the sea beneath, and coming back past lighted windows to one’s tea and fire and book - and then one has thoughts and a conception of the world and moments like a dragon fly in air - with all this I am kept very lively in my head.
Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Clive Bell dated 26 December 1909. (via violentwavesofemotion)
- ? Nov 10th 2012
We all got up; we all went. But I, pausing, looked at the tree, and as I looked in autumn at the fiery and yellow branches, some sediment formed; I formed; a drop fell; I fell - that is, from some completed experienced I had emerged.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (via violentwavesofemotion)
- ? Nov 4th 2012
I will dream today; for I must unscrew my head somehow.
Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 19 October 1937.
- ? Oct 28th 2012
Like everything else this strange morning, the words became symbols, wrote themselves all over the grey-green walls. If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things. The extraordinary unreality was frightening; but it was also exciting. Going to the lighthouse. Perished. Alone. The grey-green light on the wall opposite. The empty places. Such were some of the parts, but how bring them together?
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
- ? Oct 27th 2012
I think it is likely that the best of everything is made in solitude.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
- ? Oct 27th 2012
For having spat it out, my mind is made up. I am an outsider: I can take my way: experiment with my own imagination in my own way. That is all.
Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 20 May 1938. (via violentwavesofemotion)
- ? Oct 23rd 2012
We have come to forget that a large and important part of life consists in our emotions towards such things as roses and nightingales, the dawn, the sunset, life, death, and fate; we forget that we spend much time sleeping, dreaming, thinking, reading, alone; we are not entirely occupied in personal relations; all our energies are not absorbed in making our livings.
Virginia Woolf, The Narrow Bridge Of Art (via violentwavesofemotion)
- ? Oct 20th 2012
If we could remain untouched without any support - but you, disturbed by faint clapping sounds of praise and laughter, and I, resenting compromise and right and wrong on human lips, trust only in solitude and the violence of death and thus are divided.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (via violentwavesofemotion)
- ? Oct 16th 2012
I always have the pathos of a creature vaguely afloat in some wide open space, without support or clear knowledge of its direction.
Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 19 May 1919.
- ? Oct 12th 2012
Again my mind vibrates uncomfortably, as it always does.
Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 1 July 1918.
- ? Oct 8th 2012
I like to have space to spread my mind out in.
Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 5 September 1926. (via violentwavesofemotion)
- ? Oct 6th 2012
