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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“He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“It is no use trying to sum people up.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“There was a serenity about him always that had the look of innocence, when, technically, the word was no longer applicable.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“And I will now rock the brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the waves. Some will founder. Some will dash themselves against the cliffs. One sails alone. That is my ship. It sails into icy caverns where the sea-bear barks and stalactites swing green chairs. The waves rise, their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads. They have scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship which mounts the wave and sweeps before the gale and reaches the islands where the parrots chatter and then the creepers.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, "This is what I have made of it! This!" And what had she made of it? What, indeed?”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes -- one of the tragedies of married life.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone. "What is it to be in love?" she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea. Hypnotized by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew away, she rose, and within, her two books beneath her arm returned again, much as a soldier prepares for battle.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“and then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“The root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“There is something I want-something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme -- thinking too much.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie asleep.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Love ought to stop on both sides, don’t you think, simultaneously?’ He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake the sleepers. ‘But it won’t - that’s the devil,’ he added in the same undertone.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Tell me", he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how to speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depth of the sea instead?”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether they were beggars or people of substance.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“She fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
“Wat a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)