... pure honesty is a doubtful quality; it means often lack of imagination. Virginia Woolf More Quotes by Virginia Woolf More Quotes From Virginia Woolf ... it's been a perpetual discovery, my life. A miracle. Virginia Woolf perpetualmiraclediscovery I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street. Virginia Woolf friendshipfunnydeath If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy. Virginia Woolf diesifs Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it. Virginia Woolf reallaughingpeople If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women. Virginia Woolf menrealityworld Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake? Virginia Woolf wantsleeppeople To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Virginia Woolf invisiblebeing-alonedarkness How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling? Virginia Woolf feelingsmeanreality King old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always to to a good man, they say. Virginia Woolf catkingscharacter Twice Flush had done his utmost to kill his enemy; twice he had failed. And why had he failed, he asked himself? Because he loved Miss Barrett. Looking up at her from under his eyebrows as she lay, severe and silent on the sofa, he knew that he must love her for ever. Things are not simple but complex. If he bit Mr. Browning he bit her too. Hatred is not hatred; hatred is also love. Virginia Woolf eyebrowshatredsimple For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping. Virginia Woolf weedwindsports I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual Virginia Woolf optimisticusualwriting It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer. Virginia Woolf ridiculouscuriousprotect But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm. Virginia Woolf moodlikesenthusiasm Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision. Virginia Woolf lighthouselaying-downvision . . . to walk alone in London is the greatest rest. Virginia Woolf londonwalks 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 anxietyhousechildren ...she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstacy in the air. Where to begin?--that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made. Virginia Woolf simpleairrunning 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 eyepracticewriting ...she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Virginia Woolf mrs-dallowayone-dayfeelings
