Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was a British modernist writer of the early 20th century. She is best known for her groundbreaking novels exploring consciousness, gender, and societal norms, including *Mrs Dalloway* and *To the Lighthouse*. Her essays on literature and feminism remain influential for their insight and lyrical clarity.
“ישנם אנשים בעלי כשרונות אמיתיים; הבעיה היא לגלותם.”
“אתה לא יכול למצוא שלווה על ידי הימנעות מהחיים.”
“ללא מזון, לא ניתן לחשוב, לאהוב ולישון.”
“העיניים של אחרים הם בתי הכלא שלנו.”
“רק חיים דמיוניים הם חיים נלהבים.”
“How could one leap on the back of life and wring its scruff?”
“The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.”
“Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified.”
“. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.”
“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
“In the flailing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances”
“There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.”
“Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now. It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem’s (Paul’s was exquisite) into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road. Yet, she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this–love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.”
“They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.]”
“I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.”
“She seemed a compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine ...”
“I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.”
“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
“This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.”
“Pretty Stones”