“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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“A friend of mine’s just had a baby,” Niki said. “She’s really pleased. I can’t think why. Horrible screaming thing she’s produced.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, quote from A Pale View of Hills
“Personally, I say, "Out of the frying pan and into the deadly pit filled with sharks who are wielding chainsaws with killer kittens stapled to them." However, that one's having a rough time catching on.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener's Bones
“You want to be a better person? Go listen to someone you disagree with. don't argue with them just listen. It's remarkable what interesting things people will say if you take the time to not be a jerk.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from Alcatraz Versus the Knights of Crystallia
“Moving into the hallway, I make the mistake of looking down. The floor seems to drop out from under me, with nothing solid to support me but my own reflection.
I take a step, watching the sole of my bare left foot meet its twin rising up on the flipside. I get the weirdest sensation that I won't fall as long as I have the reversed images of my own feet to walk on.”
― Graham McNamee, quote from Bonechiller
“truth provides the most diplomatic answer): “I don’t believe I’ve ever attended one since I was your age where I didn’t feel, beforehand, an oppressive dread at the isolation that can reign in a large enough group of even the most intimate friends, much less an admixture of intimates, acquaintances, and strangers. Still, so much of my social education has been effected in such gatherings, so many true friendships have had their beginnings in meetings much like yours and mine, that I feel these affairs must not only be endured, but negotiated with a certain energy, if not commitment.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
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