Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. by Virginia Woolf

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

Virginia Woolf

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The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness

sea sleep night

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.

subtle jugs running

Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?

catastrophe illusion praise

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

toss poet fall

Whenever you see a board up with "Trespassers will be prosecuted,... by Virginia Woolf

Whenever you see a board up with "Trespassers will be prosecuted," trespass at once.

boards

It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.

differences heaven people

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth.

business truth mean

what she loved: life, London, this moment of june. by Virginia Woolf

what she loved: life, London, this moment of june.

london june moments

O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shake... by Virginia Woolf

O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!

shakespeares-sonnets pages flower

London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... To walk alone through London is the greatest rest.

play giving moving

Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.

running philosophy hands

I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another. by Virginia Woolf

I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.

sick self want

I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments.

different mind mean

Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes.

occupation attitude mean

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.

self dark beautiful

Fear no more, says the heart. by Virginia Woolf

Fear no more, says the heart.

mrs-dalloway heart

Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.

substance goes-on stories

I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a b... by Virginia Woolf

I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.

amber block reading

I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own wa... by Virginia Woolf

I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married

married want way

I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

notebook phrases stories