Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness. Virginia Woolf More Quotes by Virginia Woolf More Quotes From Virginia Woolf Only longing can fill with more of itself. Virginia Woolf longing chaos Nothing, I know, had any chance against death. Virginia Woolf chance knows Oh and I thought, as i was dressing, how interesting it would be to describe the approach of age, and the gradual coming of death. As people describe love. To note every symptom of failure: but why failure? To treat age as an experience that is different from the others; and to detect every one of the gradual stages towards death which is a tremendous experience, an not as unconscious, at least in its approaches, as death is. Virginia Woolf love people interesting She felt, with her hand on the nursery door, that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically (the feeling was one of relief and happiness) it was all one stream. Virginia Woolf wall doors hands We [women] have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that ... takes time. Virginia Woolf statistics age years women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. ... Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own. Virginia Woolf stress dog writing There is a sadness at the back of life which some people do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure. Virginia Woolf sadness shadow people A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time. Virginia Woolf knowing play art In each of us two powers preside, one male, one female: and in the man's brain, the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman's brain, the woman predominates over the man...If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Virginia Woolf brain men two The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride. Virginia Woolf knitting twilight moving ... I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony. Virginia Woolf capacity doubt animal Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that Virginia Woolf light beauty past What a comfort is friendship in this world. Virginia Woolf this-world comfort world It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man. Virginia Woolf women men art ...the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. Virginia Woolf butterfly wings beautiful But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he. Virginia Woolf deeper sea There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'. Virginia Woolf stars clouds night 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 reading book children The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpended the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a fingerprint of a shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside. Virginia Woolf wall garden light It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred. Virginia Woolf hatred soul monsters
