#vwappwk

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Virginia Woolf Appreciation Week: 1 Favorite Character: Clarissa Dalloway

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To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

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Virginia Woolf Appreciation Week: 7 Quotes from Novels

Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?

Mrs Dalloway

That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.

The Voyage Out

Sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs Ramsay’s knees, close as she could get, smiling to think that Mrs Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure, she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public.

To the Lighthouse

There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'

The Waves

You come and see me among flowers and pictures, and think me mysterious, romantic, and all the rest of it. Being yourself very inexperienced and very emotional, you go home and invent a story about me, and now you can't separate me from the person you've imagined me to be. You call that, I suppose, being in love; as a matter of fact it's being in delusion.

Night and Day

Let us go, then, exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring the plum blossom and the bee. And humming and hawing, let us ask of the starling (who is a more sociable bird than the lark) what he may think on the brink of the dust-bin, whence he picks among the sticks combings of scullion’s hair. What’s life, we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate; Life, Life, Life! cries the bird, as if he heard, and knew precisely, what we meant by this bothering prying habit of ours of asking questions indoors and out and peeping and picking at daises as the way if of writers when they don’t know what to say next! Then they come here, says the bird, and ask me what life is; Life, Life, Life!

Orlando

Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned - in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?

Jacob’s Room

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Virginia Woolf Appreciation Week: 5 Quotes from Letters (to Vita Sackville-West)

I like your energy. I love your legs. I long to see you.

22 August 1927

I can get the sensation of seeing you—hair, lips, colour, height, even, now, and then, the eyes and hands, but I find you going off, to walk in the garden, to play tennis, to dig, to sit smoking and talking, and then I can't invent a thing you say—This proves, what I could write reams about—how little we know anyone, only movements, and gestures, nothing connected, continuous, profound. But give me a hint I implore.

7 September 1925

Do you exist? Have I made you up?

20 March 1929

I do miss you; I think of you: I have a million things, not so much to say, as to sink into you.

16 March, 1926

I could only think of you as being very distant and beautiful and calm. A lighthouse in clean waters.

31 January 1927

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Virginia Woolf Appreciation Week: 3 Closing Lines

'I will come' said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? What is this ecstacy? He thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.

Mrs Dalloway

Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.

To the Lighthouse

For a moment they waited, and then loosed their hands. "Good night," he breathed. "Good night," she murmured back to him.

Night and Day

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Virginia Woolf Appreciation Week: 4 Quotes from Diary Entries

How extraordinarily unwilled by me but potent in its own right, by the way, Orlando was! As if it shoved everything aside to come into existence.

20 December 1927

I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it? Then (as I was walking through Russell Square last night) I see the mountains in the sky: great clouds; and the moon risen over Persia; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is "it." It is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory; achieved.

27 February 1926

Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on forever; goes down to the bottom of the world — this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change, one flying after another, so quick, so quick, yet we are somehow successive and continuous we human beings, and show the light through. But what is the light? I am impressed by the transitoriness of human life to such an extent that I am often saying a farewell–after dining with Roger for instance; or reckoning how many more times I shall see Nessa.

4 February 1929

The human mind is always seeking what it conceives to be the centre of things; sometimes one may call it reality, again truth, again life — I don't now what I call it; but I distinctly visualise it as a possession...

18 October 1918

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Virginia Woolf Appreciation Week: 6 Quotes from Short Stories

“Safe, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “Long years—” he sighs. “Again you found me.” “Here,” she murmurs, “sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure—” Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. “Safe! safe! safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”

A Haunted House

What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, inextricably commingled, bound in pain and strewn in sorrow – crash!

The String Quartet

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?

An Unwritten Novel

‘Yes,’ he said at length. ‘Poor Lapinova. . .’ He straightened his tie at the looking-glass mantelpiece. ‘Caught in a trap,’ he said ‘killed,’ and sat down and read the newspaper. So that was the end of that marriage.

Lappin and Lapinova

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour – landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ...

The Mark on the Wall

People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms.

The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection

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Virginia Woolf Appreciation Week: January 24-30. Tag: VWappWk

Jan.24: 7 quotes from novels

Jan.25: 6 quotes from short stories

Jan.26: 5 quotes from letters

Jan.27: 4 quotes from diary entries

Jan.28: 3 closing lines

Jan.29: 2 opening lines novels

Jan.30: 1 favorite character