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We float, we float…

Virginia Woolf, from The Waves (via violentwavesofemotion)

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I am astonished, as I draw the veil off things with words, how much, how infinitely more than I can say, I have observed.

Virginia Woolf, from The Waves (via violentwavesofemotion)

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James Strachey and Virginia Woolf in 1934

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I am clouded and bruised with the print of minds and faces and things so subtle that they have smell, colour, texture, substance but no name.

Virginia Woolf, from The Waves (via violentwavesofemotion)

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…she fell into a dream state, in which she became another person, and the whole world seemed changed.

Virginia Woolf, from Night And Day (via violentwavesofemotion)

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She became curiously depressed.

Virginia Woolf, from Night And Day (via violentwavesofemotion)

[vwvw]

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction (via vwvw)

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…she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

Virginia Woolf, from Mrs. Dalloway (via violentwavesofemotion)

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…she was very far from saying, even in the privacy of her own mind, “I am in love with you,” and that sentence might very well never have framed itself.

Virginia Woolf, from Night And Day (via violentwavesofemotion)

[wavingtovirginia]

Their lack of concern for him was not the cause of his gloom; but some more profound conviction—it was not that he himself happened to be lonely, but that all people are.

Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (via wavingtovirginia)

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She was very angry, and yet impotent to give expression to her anger, or know with whom she was angry.

Virginia Woolf, from Night And Day (via violentwavesofemotion)

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I’m always afraid that I’m missing something —

Virginia Woolf, from Night And Day (via violentwavesofemotion)

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LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS:

Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf.

On Feb. 19 I proposed to Virginia, and was accepted. It was an awkward moment, as you may imagine, especially as I realised, the very minute it was happening, that the whole thing was repulsive to me. Her sense was amazing, and luckily it turned out that she’s not in love. The result was that I was able to manage a fairly honorable retreat.

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I’ve been buried under with the dust and rubbish. But now, here’s the spring …

Virginia Woolf, in a letter to Vita [1935], from The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf (via anenlighteningellipses)

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Like most intelligent people, she was something of an egoist, to the extent, that is, of attaching great importance to what she felt, and she was by nature enough of a moralist to like to make certain, from time to time, that her feelings were creditable to her.

Virginia Woolf, from Night And Day (via violentwavesofemotion)

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I always think of you when I’m writing, even when it’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t know about.

Virginia Woolf, from Night And Day (via violentwavesofemotion)

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She absolutely gets me through the day