April 2010
54 posts
“I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street.”
— Virginia Woolf
“Katherine haunted her as we are haunted by people we have loved, but with whom we have not completed our conversation, with whom we have unfinished business.”
—
—Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf’s biographer, writing of Katherine Mansfield’s posthumous effect on Woolf.
After Katherine died, Virginia would dream of her and the dreams would be so vivid that they stayed with her after she woke from them.
“Desiring truth, awaiting it, laboriously distilling a few words, for ever desiring—(a cry starts to the left, another to the right. Wheels strike divergently. Omnibuses conglomerate in conflict)—for ever desiring.”
— Virginia Woolf
“Odd how rare it is to meet people who say things that we ourselves could have said. Their attitude to life much our own.”
—Virginia Woolf (via awritersruminations)
“What people had shed and left - a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded
skirts and coats in wardrobes - these alone kept the human shape and in the
emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands
were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking glass had held a
face.” —Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (via wordpainting) (via awritersruminations)
skirts and coats in wardrobes - these alone kept the human shape and in the
emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands
were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking glass had held a
face.” —Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (via wordpainting) (via awritersruminations)
“So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood, - by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.”
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs.Dalloway
Books: How Time Passes →
time.com
Time, Monday, April 12, 1937
“Last year Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta, Ga. wrote her first novel. Gone With The Wind. Last week Virginia Woolf of London, England published her seventh. The Years* Margaret Mitchell’s book has sold more copies (1,300,000) than all Virginia Woolf’s put together. But literary brokers who take a long view of the market are stocking up with Woolfs, unloading Mitchells (TIME, April 5). Their opinion is that Margaret Mitchell was a grand wildcat stock but Virginia Woolf a sound investment.
Virginia Woolf has been called ´the best-equipped and the most disappointing woman novelist in the history of English literature.´ That she can be considered a disappointment indicates that she may be not just a highbrow writer but perhaps a great one. She is certainly the foremost woman author of her day. Her books are addressed not to a literary clique but to the Intelligent Common Reader. And the address is written in such a fine and flowing hand that even when it is illegible the hopeful addressee can find some profitable pleasure in puzzling over it. Even her obscurer books have something about them that attracts popular attention, for more than most stylists, she writes about the common gist of things.(…)”
“What Time means, what Space is, what the Sea mirrors is more than Virginia Woolf can say: but that they are, that they mean and mirror some Reality measureless to man is the whole import of her writing.”
“Though Virginia Woolf’s experience was as restricted as Jane Austen’s, her reading knew no bounds.”
“She never lost her faith for she was never taught any.”
“She rarely makes a public appearance. She has no children. Careless of her clothes, her face, her greying hair, at 55 she is the picture of a sensitive, cloistered literary woman. Jealous juniors derisively style her “The Queen of Bloomsbury.” Her physical existence is as sheltered now as it always has been. But in the 12-ft. square workroom, whose old-fashioned uncurtained windows overlook a half-acre of English garden, she has made a world of her own. It is not a cork-lined invalid’s retreat like Marcel Proust’s, with the shades drawn; nor a chamber of nightmares like James Joyce’s, where after dark all the familiar objects break up into strange & sinister shapes. Visitors who feel at home in Virginia Woolfs world say it is a room with a view.”
“We must admit that he had eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which were his temples.”
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
“Love, the poet said, is woman’s whole existence.”
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
“The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.”
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
