“I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme -- thinking too much.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“...I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“I am I: and I must follow that furrow, not copy another. That is the only justification for my writing, living.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on forever; goes down to the bottom of the world -- this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change, one flying after another, so quick, so quick, yet we are somehow successive and continuous we human beings, and show the light through. But what is the light?”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“I want to resemble a sort of liquid light which stretches beyond visibility or invisibility. Tonight I wish to have the valor and daring to belong to the moon”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. And to alter now, cleanly and sanely, I want to shuffle off this loose living randomness: people; reviews; fame; all the glittering scales; and be withdrawn, and concentrated.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“Unpraised, I find it hard to start writing in the morning; but the dejection lasts only 30 minutes, and once I start I forget all about it. One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, a silence there;[...] the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“...and to forget one's own sharp absurd little personality, reputation and the rest of it, one should read; see outsiders; think more; write more logically; above all be full of work; and practise anonymity. Silence in company; or the quietest statement, not the showiest; is also "medicated" as the doctors say. It was an empty party, rather, last night. Very nice here, though.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“I know this room too well - this view too well - I am getting it all out of focus, because I can't walk through it.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“I was thinking between 3 and 4 this morning, of my 55 years. I lay awake so calm, so content, as if I'd stepped off the whirling world into a deep blue quiet space and there open eyed existed, beyond harm; armed against all that can happen.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“...to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“But what little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes, and not only to my eyes; also to some nervous fibre, or fanlike membrane in my species.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“I note however that this diary writing does not count as writing, since I have just re-read my year's diary and am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“Thus I hope to have kept the sound of the sea and the birds, dawn and garden subconsciously present, doing their work under ground.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“A good day—a bad day—so it goes on. Few people can be so tortured by writing as I am. Only Flaubert I think. Yet I see it now, as a whole. I think I can bring it off, if I only have courage and patience: take each scene quietly: compose: I think it may be a good book. And then—oh when it's finished!”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“Övgüler yerindeydi de, yerinde olmayan sinirlerimdi.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“Heaven knows what virtue it has, this ecstatic book.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
Virginia Woolf
Born place: in Kensington, Middlesex, England, The United Kingdom
Born date January 25, 1882
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“And the strange thing was he had never loved her more than in that moment, because at that moment she had become himself.
But thats not love, he thought, thats not what she wants, not what any of them want, they do not want you to find yourself in them, they want instead that you should lose yourself in them. And yet, he thought, they are always trying to find themselves in you. [...]
And it seemed to him then that every human was always looking for himself, in bars, in railway trains, in offices, in mirrors, in love, especially in love, for the self of him that is there, someplace, in every other human. Love was not to give oneself, but find oneself, describe oneself. And that the whole conception had been written wrong. Because the only part of any man that he can ever touch or understand is that part of himself he recognises in him. And that he is always looking for the way in which he can expose his sealed bee cell and reach the other airtight cells with which he is connected in the waxy comb.
And the only way he had ever found, the only code, the only language by which he could speak and be heard by other men, could communicate himself, was with a bugle. If you had a bugle here, he told himself, you could speak to her and be understood, you could play Fatigue Call for her, with its tiredness, its heavy belly going out to sweep somebody else's streets when it would rather stay home and sleep, she would understand it then.
But you havent got a bugle, himself said, not here nor any other place. Your tongue has been ripped out. All you got is two bottles, one nearly full, one nearly empty.”
― James Jones, quote from From Here to Eternity
“Don't make another's pain the source of your own happiness.”
― quote from The Paladin Prophecy
“The petulance that relatives show towards each other is in truth directed against that intangible Causality which has shaped the situation no less for the offenders than the offended, but is too elusive to be discerned and cornered by poor humanity in irritated mood.”
― Thomas Hardy, quote from The Woodlanders
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be…”
― Joan Didion, quote from Slouching Towards Bethlehem
“He raises his head. "You're nothing like your father, Monty. For a start, you're far more decent than he is."
I'm not sure how, after all the terrible things I've done, he can possibly mean that. "You might be the only person left on earth who thinks me decent."
Between us, I feel his knuckles brush mine. Perhaps it's by chance, but it feels more like a question, and when I spread my fingers in answer, his hand slides into mine.
"Then everyone else doesn't know you.”
― Mackenzi Lee, quote from The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue
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