Virginia Woolf

 

Im terrified of passive aquiescene. I live in intensity.

“In case you ever foolishly forget: I am never not thinking of you.”

My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness

In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness, dull, callous, and indifferent.

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”

“I am rooted, but I flow.”

“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”

“Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.”

“All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.”

“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”

“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”

 

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― 
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”

“I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.”

“How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

“I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.”

I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.”

“...who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?”

Language is wine upon the lips

The artist after all is a solitary being

I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words

Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea

“Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotchpotch of impulses, our perpetual miracle - for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death; let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.”

Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself.

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