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You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.

Virginia Woolf

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Virginia Woolf
Age: 59 †
Born: 1882
Born: January 25
Died: 1941
Died: March 28
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Feminist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Publisher
Short Story Writer
Writer
London
England
Virxhinia Ulf
Virginia yo juanito Adeline Woolf
Virg̔inyah Vold
Virdžiniâ Vulf
Virdzhiniia Vulf
Virzhinia Ulf
Virginia Stephen
Virzhin︠iia Ulf
Adeline Virginia Stephen
Virginyah Volf
Adeline Virginia Woolf
Virginia Adeline Woolf
Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf
Birtzinia Gulph
Virginia Stephen Woolf
Woolf
Virginia
1882-1941
Poetry
Pure
Talk
Water
Adulterated
Makes
Lecture
Cannot
Lectures
Best
Ingredients
Really
Critics

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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.
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Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.
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I am tied down with single words. But you wander off you slip away you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.
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[Final diary entry:] Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it's seven and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.
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Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.
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I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments.
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The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.
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letters are venerable and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps - who knows? - we might talk by the way.
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O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.
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There is a coherence in things, a stability something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.
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Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.
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He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds-that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.
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How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?
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Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.
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Chastity ... has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.
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Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.
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Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.
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So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
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The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
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Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
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