The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the features from faces. People might walk through me. And what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar - forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel; our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.
Virginia Woolf
Related I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery tur... SYLVIA PLATH For me, you are fresh water that falls from trees when it has stopped raining. For me... KAMAND KOJOURI [Poem: Slates of Grey] Sullen faces like slates of grey— What I’d seen on a walk... JESS C. SCOTT Elm BY SYLVIA PLATH I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap r... SYLVIA PLATH I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ... KELLY JONES Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland, Beasts of every land and clime, Hearken to my joyful... GEORGE ORWELL I am five, I will never understand why we are stranded in our selves but in this moment I ... SHARON DOUBIAGO This is an ode to life. The anthem of the world. For as there are billions of differe... KAMAND KOJOURI somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence: E.E. CUMMINGS I feel his arm Lightly Over me. He takes one of my outstretched hands. Draws i... STASIA WARD KEHOE Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk only on feelings. That faces upward and i... RAINER MARIA RILKE We, unaccustomed to courage exiles from delight live coiled in shells of loneliness u... MAYA ANGELOU A Litany for Survival For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon... AUDRE LORDE In Blackwater Woods Look, the trees are turning their own bodies in... MARY OLIVER Storm Warnings The glass has been falling all the afternoon, And knowing better tha... ADRIENNE RICH I write our names on the page. What of it, if the paper will be burned? I write our names ... KAMAND KOJOURI As I age in the world it will rise and spread, and be for this place horizon and orison, t... WENDELL BERRY Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, a... MARY OLIVER Anxiety and Afraid of being rejected, have always been the killer/s of our dreams.... ...... DEYTH BANGER SEA OF LIFE This is not the end, my friend. Just as the ocean sings songs to infinit... SUZY KASSEM This land, although not my native land, Will be remembered forever. And the sea's lightly ... ANNA AKHMATOVA Looking for Your Face From the beginning of my life I have been looking for your fac... JALALUDDIN MEVLANA RUMI They stay in my mind, these beautiful people, or anyway beautiful people to me, of which t... MARY OLIVER My child, I know you're not a child But I still see you running wild Between those floweri... ANTONIA MICHAELIS (I know, it's a poem but oh well). Why! who makes much of a miracle? As to me, I know of ... WALT WHITMAN A Dream Within A Dream Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you... EDGAR ALLAN POE Light That's how I feel- like the winter-fringed breeze might scoop me up ... ELLEN HOPKINS In the summer I stretch out on the shore And think of you. Had I told the sea What I ... نزار قباني There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There i... GEORGE GORDON BYRON YOUR GREATER ANIMAL They say that if you are Ever confronted by A lion or... SUZY KASSEM "Conversation" God and I in space alone . . . and nobody else in view . . . "And wh... ELLA WHEELER WILCOX When winds are raging o'er the upper ocean And billows wild contend with angry roar, 'Tis said... HARRIET BEECHER STOWE I saw thee once - only once - years ago: I must not say how many - but not many. It was a ... EDGAR ALLAN POE We sit and talk, quietly, with long lapses of silence and I am aware of the stream th... WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS 6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days, and I still don’t know which month it was then or what day it... CHARLOTTE ERIKSSON nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility:whos... E.E. CUMMINGS See it was like this when we waltz into this place. A couple of papish cats i... LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI Lay down Your tired & weary head my friend. We have wept too long Night is fallin... JOSé N. HARRIS Why is my love for you, dyed in wool? What is the hindrance to moving on? Why in lov... ZUBAIR AHSAN On Ponkawtasset, since, we took our way, Down this still stream we took our meadowy way, A... HENRY DAVID THOREAU Our freedom to say or write whatever we please in this country is holy to me. It is a rare privilege... KURT VONNEGUT The Knowing Afterwards, when we have slept, paradise- comaed and woken, we lie a l... SHARON OLDS Yawn... I believe that I love sleep much more than anybody I’ve ever met. CHARLES BUKOWSKI Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are mel... WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are ... WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Through countless births in the cycle of existence I have run, not finding although seek... GAUTAMA BUDDHA Pretty Song" From the complications of loving you I think there is no end or return.... MARY OLIVER I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with. Tell me why you loved... ANDREA GIBSON There was something wrong with me. The human body doesn’t want to get hurt. We’re pro... MAGGIE STIEFVATER Sonnet I If thee must say that I am not who I am, That I am not real or true,<... SHANNON L. ALDER From birth to death and further on As we were born and introduced into this world, W... VIRGIL KALYANA MITTATA IORDACHE Weve poisoned the air, the water, and the land. In our passion to control nature, things h... ROBERT REDFORD A BIRTHDAY Something continues and I don't know what to call it though the language... W.S. MERWIN I have many lovers. Where ever I look, I find them. There is no place devoid of them. ANSUL NOOR Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything ... PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. BERTRAND RUSSELL A Gift for You I send you... The gift of a letter from your wise self. This is the p... S.A.R.K. Because there are no guarantees. No promises on time. There is only this moment. And ... J. SAMAN Intoxicate me with the beauty and breath of your soul. Leave such imprints on my heart MELODY LEE There is a desire within each of us, in the deep center of ourselves that we call our hea... GERALD G. MAY Sour Milk You can't make it turn sweet again. Once it was an innocen... DIANE WAKOSKI The wind sings of our nostalgia and the starry sky ignores our dreams. Each snow flake is... MARGOT BICKEL The Clock on the Morning Lenape Building Must Clocks be circles? Time is not a circl... JERRY SPINELLI For Jenn At 12 years old I started bleeding with the moon and beating up boys who dr... ANDREA GIBSON The traffic warden looked up. "This your car?" "It is," said Skulduggery. The traffic wa... DEREK LANDY I am not the first person you loved. You are not the first person I looked at with a mouth... CLEMENTINE VON RADICS I WANT her though, to take the same from me. She touches me as if I were herself, her own. D.H. LAWRENCE Closed eyes can't sacrifice a third time i may never know A dreamer's dream GREG C WARNER The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind happiness not always... LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. b... LUCILLE CLIFTON I call you my soulmate because I lost myself in you and then found myself through you. <... KAMAND KOJOURI THE BARROW In this high field strewn with stones I walk by a green mound, It... ANTHONY THWAITE Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow- Yo... EDGAR ALLAN POE The dripping blood our only drink, The bloody flesh our only food: In spite of which we li... T.S. ELIOT Haunted You haunt me in my dreams I can only hear my drowning screams Is it bec... STACE LEE Not to waste the spring I threw down everything, And ran into the open world To sing ... ROMAN PAYNE He's outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.) And his footprints are not found in ... T.S. ELIOT The season was waning fast Our nights were growing cold at last I took her to bed with sil... ROMAN PAYNE You have known, O Gilgamesh, What interests me, To drink from the Well of Immortality. HERBERT MASON during my worst times on the park benches in the jails or living with whores CHARLES BUKOWSKI Nobody can claim the name of Pedro, nobody is Rosa or María, all of us are dust or sand,<... PABLO NERUDA I loved you, so I drew these tides of Men into my hands And wrote my will across the ... T.E. LAWRENCE This is what I am, I'll say, to leave this written excuse. This is my life. Now it is clea... PABLO NERUDA Last night the rain spoke to me slowly, saying, what joy to come falling MARY OLIVER Relief is a great feeling. It’s the emotional and physical reward we receive from our b... VERA NAZARIAN O, weary angels, don’t look at me with those eyes. If that is your state then wha... KAMAND KOJOURI . . .because we had survived sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, we discovered bones... LISEL MUELLER Was that me? Yes it was. Was that him? No it wasn't.. Just a trick of the woods! Just ... STEPHEN SONDHEIM From this day forward, I vowed to myself, I was in control of my life. Not fate, not God, ... V.C. ANDREWS I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see I swallow immediately Just... SYLVIA PLATH SEASONS OF LIFE Sometimes I fall And feel myself slowly wilt and die, But then ... SUZY KASSEM Linger now with me, thou Beauty, On the sharp archaic shore. Surely 'tis a wastrel's dut... MERVYN PEAKE MOTHER IS WATER I wish I could Shower your head with flowers And anoint your fe... SUZY KASSEM Suddenly this defeat. This rain. The blues gone gray And the browns gone gray An... JACK GILBERT AFTER SCHOOL SPECIAL Dear Mr. Schneider, I attended your elementary Schoo... SUZY KASSEM Pale were your looks; and the rose in your tresses Paler of hue than the dreams we have lost; ... MADISON CAWEIN Love Has a way of wilting Or blossoming At the strangest, Most unpredictable hou... SUZY KASSEM What is this love that makes me see beauty, and makes every beautiful thing bring yo... KAMAND KOJOURI But I was young and didn’t know better and someone should have told me to capture every ... CHARLOTTE ERIKSSON
More Virginia Woolf
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. VIRGINIA WOOLF Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in c... VIRGINIA WOOLF One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as w... VIRGINIA WOOLF Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends c... VIRGINIA WOOLF I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It exp... VIRGINIA WOOLF Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and t... VIRGINIA WOOLF Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art. VIRGINIA WOOLF Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded. VIRGINIA WOOLF It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. 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VIRGINIA WOOLF Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written ... VIRGINIA WOOLF I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I... VIRGINIA WOOLF We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. VIRGINIA WOOLF Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! VIRGINIA WOOLF It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entir... VIRGINIA WOOLF The older one grows, the more one likes indecency. VIRGINIA WOOLF Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever t... VIRGINIA WOOLF At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials. VIRGINIA WOOLF These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect t... 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VIRGINIA WOOLF My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery --always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring... VIRGINIA WOOLF It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if... VIRGINIA WOOLF If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure -- the relationship so secret and private compa... VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of... VIRGINIA WOOLF Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women? VIRGINIA WOOLF All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority an... VIRGINIA WOOLF Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to t... VIRGINIA WOOLF But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in,... VIRGINIA WOOLF It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handlin... VIRGINIA WOOLF Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art. VIRGINIA WOOLF Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distort... VIRGINIA WOOLF Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned... VIRGINIA WOOLF The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the poli... VIRGINIA WOOLF That great Cathedral space which was childhood. VIRGINIA WOOLF The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping. VIRGINIA WOOLF Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of an... VIRGINIA WOOLF Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or VIRGINIA WOOLF When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred. VIRGINIA WOOLF We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even t... VIRGINIA WOOLF Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human... VIRGINIA WOOLF The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to fol... VIRGINIA WOOLF If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about e... VIRGINIA WOOLF A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in t... VIRGINIA WOOLF One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than whe... VIRGINIA WOOLF The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind. VIRGINIA WOOLF Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic. VIRGINIA WOOLF It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with... VIRGINIA WOOLF To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves. VIRGINIA WOOLF Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doin... VIRGINIA WOOLF No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. VIRGINIA WOOLF As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking. VIRGINIA WOOLF When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing. VIRGINIA WOOLF If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. VIRGINIA WOOLF I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It exp... VIRGINIA WOOLF Books are the mirrors of the soul. VIRGINIA WOOLF I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, re... VIRGINIA WOOLF To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father. VIRGINIA WOOLF Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the... VIRGINIA WOOLF Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever ... VIRGINIA WOOLF Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the... VIRGINIA WOOLF Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. VIRGINIA WOOLF The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. VIRGINIA WOOLF Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills ... VIRGINIA WOOLF Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you. VIRGINIA WOOLF One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of... VIRGINIA WOOLF A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her c... VIRGINIA WOOLF The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as s... VIRGINIA WOOLF But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority th... VIRGINIA WOOLF The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only... VIRGINIA WOOLF Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. VIRGINIA WOOLF There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intell... VIRGINIA WOOLF I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and w... VIRGINIA WOOLF I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure. VIRGINIA WOOLF Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before... VIRGINIA WOOLF Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our c... VIRGINIA WOOLF Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. VIRGINIA WOOLF Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be subst... VIRGINIA WOOLF Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... ... VIRGINIA WOOLF When a subject is highly controversial... one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how o... VIRGINIA WOOLF I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locke... VIRGINIA WOOLF Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every ye... VIRGINIA WOOLF Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and s... VIRGINIA WOOLF As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk... VIRGINIA WOOLF Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of cre... VIRGINIA WOOLF Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can on... VIRGINIA WOOLF For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in com... VIRGINIA WOOLF Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped... VIRGINIA WOOLF Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. VIRGINIA WOOLF A strange thing has happened -- while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has be... VIRGINIA WOOLF There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them ... VIRGINIA WOOLF Humor is the first gift to perish in a foreign language. VIRGINIA WOOLF Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still posse... VIRGINIA WOOLF For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private f... VIRGINIA WOOLF What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accid... VIRGINIA WOOLF Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of E... VIRGINIA WOOLF If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, w... VIRGINIA WOOLF What is meant by reality? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be... VIRGINIA WOOLF One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats --and one always secret... VIRGINIA WOOLF Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. VIRGINIA WOOLF Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even slee... VIRGINIA WOOLF The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only... VIRGINIA WOOLF In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us. VIRGINIA WOOLF Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning. VIRGINIA WOOLF The first duty of a lecturer--to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap u... VIRGINIA WOOLF It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality VIRGINIA WOOLF The first duty of a lecturer is to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap... VIRGINIA WOOLF Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women? VIRGINIA WOOLF The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story o... VIRGINIA WOOLF All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority an... VIRGINIA WOOLF A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. VIRGINIA WOOLF Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation. VIRGINIA WOOLF It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeate... VIRGINIA WOOLF This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to... VIRGINIA WOOLF On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points. VIRGINIA WOOLF When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazing... VIRGINIA WOOLF Language is wine upon the lips. VIRGINIA WOOLF Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry. VIRGINIA WOOLF A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it mu... VIRGINIA WOOLF Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the fi... VIRGINIA WOOLF Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figu... VIRGINIA WOOLF It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by c... VIRGINIA WOOLF One must love everything. VIRGINIA WOOLF How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this... VIRGINIA WOOLF The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish,... VIRGINIA WOOLF You cannot find peace by avoiding life. VIRGINIA WOOLF Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at... VIRGINIA WOOLF These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one... VIRGINIA WOOLF Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparen... VIRGINIA WOOLF Arrange whatever pieces come your way. VIRGINIA WOOLF Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bag... VIRGINIA WOOLF It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly. VIRGINIA WOOLF One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than... VIRGINIA WOOLF He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life. VIRGINIA WOOLF When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman se... VIRGINIA WOOLF It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hea... VIRGINIA WOOLF Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their ... VIRGINIA WOOLF To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want a... VIRGINIA WOOLF For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury y... VIRGINIA WOOLF For most of history, Anonymous was a woman. VIRGINIA WOOLF The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like ... VIRGINIA WOOLF I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. VIRGINIA WOOLF Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often ... VIRGINIA WOOLF The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty obser... VIRGINIA WOOLF Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all g... VIRGINIA WOOLF I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am roo... VIRGINIA WOOLF It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people ... VIRGINIA WOOLF It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning. VIRGINIA WOOLF One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her p... VIRGINIA WOOLF I rise from my worst disasters, I turn, I change. VIRGINIA WOOLF As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole worl... VIRGINIA WOOLF How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the sol... VIRGINIA WOOLF Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life. VIRGINIA WOOLF What does the brain matter compared with the heart? VIRGINIA WOOLF Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read. VIRGINIA WOOLF Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. VIRGINIA WOOLF If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure -- the relationship so secret and private com... VIRGINIA WOOLF I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street. VIRGINIA WOOLF I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of... VIRGINIA WOOLF The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness. VIRGINIA WOOLF If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly an... VIRGINIA WOOLF Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart. VIRGINIA WOOLF I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality o... VIRGINIA WOOLF The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. VIRGINIA WOOLF I am rooted, but I flow. VIRGINIA WOOLF When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they? VIRGINIA WOOLF Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. VIRGINIA WOOLF The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge... VIRGINIA WOOLF One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always se... VIRGINIA WOOLF I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it. VIRGINIA WOOLF The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is ... VIRGINIA WOOLF If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy... VIRGINIA WOOLF With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets—what nonsense was he ... VIRGINIA WOOLF Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck betwee... VIRGINIA WOOLF Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing. VIRGINIA WOOLF One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtl... VIRGINIA WOOLF What I value is the naked contact of a mind. VIRGINIA WOOLF Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic ac... VIRGINIA WOOLF All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense ... VIRGINIA WOOLF To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last,... VIRGINIA WOOLF