A Writer's Ruminations

"Her life – that was the only chance she had – the short season between two silences."

— Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out  (via vwvw)

"She did not wish to remember; it troubled her when people tried to disturb her loneliness; she wished to be alone. She wished for nothing else in the world."

— Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (via flowerville)

"I am interested in impossible embodiments. I wish to write; I wish to write about certain things that cannot be held. I want to create a sea of freely-flowing words of no definite form and shape waves of fluent exactness."

— Virginia Woolf, Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909 (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)

"Her mind was like a wound exposed to dry in the air."

— Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (via birdonwing)

"Is it not possible—I often wonder—that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? I see it—the past—as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. There at the end of the avenue still, are the garden and the nursery. Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past. I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start."

— Virginia Woolf, Selected Diaries (via violentwavesofemotion)

"That beautiful mind! That was the thing. Lucid, passionate, independent, acute, proudly and incessantly nourished, eccentric for honorable reasons, sensitive for every reason, it has marked us forever. Allow it its blind spots, for it could detect pure gold. It could detect contradictory purity. In the presence of poetic fire it sent out shower of sparks on its own. It was a mind like some marvelous enchanter’s instrument."

— Eudora Welty, on Virginia Woolf, from N.Y Times Book Review (via violentwavesofemotion)

"I sincerely hope I’ll never fathom you. You’re mystical, serene, intriguing; you enclose such charm within you. The lustre of your presence bewitches me. I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd. It is not mere words on paper, Mrs. Nicholson, it is both my mind and heart addressing you."

— Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West dated 27 May 1927 (via violentwavesofemotion)

"One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one’s words."

— Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary