What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home… Continue reading Virginia Woolf
The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight. — Virginia Woolf, from “The String Quartet,” Monday… Continue reading Virginia Woolf
About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she murmured, dreamily, half asleep, how we perished, each alone. — Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. (Everyman’s Library; RE ISSUE edition November 3, 1992) Originally published May 5th 1927.
Very gently and quietly, almost as if it were the blood singing in her veins, or the water of the stream running over stones, she became conscious of a new feeling within her. She wondered for a moment what it was, and then said to herself, with a little surprise at recognising in her own… Continue reading Virginia Woolf
Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life? She clenched her hands and felt the hard little coins she was holding. Perhaps there’s ‘I’ at the middle of it, she thought; a knot; a centre; and again she saw herself… Continue reading Virginia Woolf,
She had the rapt look of one brushing through crowds on a summer’s afternoon, when the trees are rustling, the wheels churning yellow, and the tumult of the present seems like an elegy for past happiness and past summers, and there rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if time and eternity showed through… Continue reading Virginia Woolf
Crowding, like a fluttering bird, one sentence crosses the empty space between us. — Virginia Woolf, The Waves. (Hogarth Press October 8, 1931)
The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice. ― Virginia Woolf, Orlando. (Penguin Classic; Abridged edition, October 3, 2000) Originally published October 11th 1928.
I feel insignificant, lost, but exultant. — Virginia Woolf, The Waves. (Harvest Books 1978) Originally published October 8th 1931.
Beneath my eyes opens—a book; I see to the bottom; the heart—I see to the depths. I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart.… Continue reading Virginia Woolf
The Vale of Soul-Making 