"So now, taking upon me the mystery of things, I could go like a spy without leaving this place, without stirring from my chair…. The birds sing in chorus; the house is whitened; the sleeper stretches; gradually all is astir. Light floods the room and drives shadow beyond shadow to where they hang in folds inscrutable. What does this central shadow hold? Something? Nothing? I do not know…." ―Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"… and should any sleeper, fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of his soul…. Useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what and why and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer." ―Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
"If I could catch the feeling I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world." ―Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf
"I have wrapped myself round in my own personality again. How does it come about - these sudden,intense changes of view? Perhaps my life is unusually conscious: very vivid to me. But when I enter a complete world of its own, I realise that this is existing whether I exist or not; and so get bowled over." ―Virginia Woolf, Diary Entry, 9 May 1926. (via abstraktum)
"Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; vary various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten, and flung about the room…. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant." ―Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this —But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it. - Vita Sackville West to Virginia Woolf
Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.--Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville West
