Book detail: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated) is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
The Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated) is a meticulously curated collection that brings together the entire body of work by the celebrated author. This collection encompasses her novels, short stories, essays, and other writings, each accompanied by illustrative imagery that enhances the reader's experience. It serves as a comprehensive resource for those interested in exploring the depth and breadth of Woolf's literary contributions.
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“Am I alone in my egotism when I say that never does the pale light of dawn filter through the blinds of 52 Tavistock Square but I open my eyes and exclaim, "Good God! Here I am again!" not always with pleasure, often with pain; sometimes in a spasm.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“O how blessed it would be never to marry, or grow old; but to spend one's life innocently and indifferently among the trees and rivers which alone can keep one cool and childlike in the midst of the troubles of the world!”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?... What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Nothing shakes my opinion of a book. Nothing -- nothing. Only perhaps if it's the book of a young person -- or of a friend -- no, even so, I think myself infallible.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“loveliness is infernally sad.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“old emotions like old families have intermarried and have many connections.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“All extremes are dangerous.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“As a creator of character his peculiarity is that he creates wherever his eyes rest ... With such a power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“The profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait - whether to fish with worms or not.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“fishing teaches a stern morality; inculcates a remorseless honesty.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“literature is the record of our discontent.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“more and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Books should stand on their own feet ... If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“... the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, silence there ... the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“... I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Speech is an old torn net, through which the fish escape as one casts it over them.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“The comparison between Coleridge and Johnson is obvious in so far as each held sway chiefly by the power of his tongue. The difference between their methods is so marked that it is tempting, but also unnecessary, to judge one to be inferior to the other. Johnson was robust, combative, and concrete; Coleridge was the opposite. The contrast was perhaps in his mind when he said of Johnson: "his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Conversation, fastidious goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“That complete statement which is literature.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“What greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into these footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men? That is true: to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Thus Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility; and Mr. Hemingway, but much less violently, follows suit.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“With my cheek leant upon the window pane I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be upon the massy wall of time, which is forever lifting and pulling and letting fresh spaces of life in upon us. May it be mine to taste the moment before it has spread itself over the rest of the world! Let me taste the newest and the freshest.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)