George Charles Beresford

35 Times Virginia Woolf Eloquently Expressed Our Deepest Thoughts.

I do not know myself sometimes.
Sade Andria Zabala
January 25, 2017
“Clear-cut and unequivocal am I too. Yet a vast inheritance of experience is packed in me. I have lived thousands of years. I am like a worm that has eaten its way through the wood of a very old oak beam. But now I am compact; now I am gathered together this fine morning.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Conservation
“Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one’s friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one’s self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody— with whom?— with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I?”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Identity, Mixed
“I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Identity
“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Fluid Identity, Who Calls When I Say I?, Always Shifting
“Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and fall and rise again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet. Boats and youth passing and distant trees, ‘the falling fountains of the pendent trees.’ I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this, I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop— how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot give myself to their backs; I cannot fly with them.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Ideals, Longing, Power of Words
“It is true that the surface may have some connection with the depths, but if we are to help you to prevent war we must try to penetrate deeper beneath the skin.”
— Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
Tagged: Surface, Stop War
“Tears rose slowly in her eyes and stood there, brimming but contained. The tears of some profound emotion, happiness, grief, renunciation; an emotion so complex in its nature that to express it was impossible.”
— Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
Tagged: Tears, Crying, The Meaning of Tears
“It seemed to her that there was something amateurish in bringing romantic love into touch with a perfectly straightforward friendship.”
— Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
Tagged: Marriage, Love, Friendship
“The birds sang passionate songs addressed to one ear only and then stopped. Bubbling and chuckling they carried little bits of straw and twig to the dark knots in the higher branches of the trees. Gilt and purpled they perched in the garden, where cones of laburnum and purple shook down gold and lilac, for now at midday the garden was all blossom and profusion and even the tunnels under the plants were green and purple and tawny as the sun beat through the red petal, or the broad yellow petal, or was barred by some thickly furred green stalk.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Song of Birds, Nature Descriptions
“Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Pain
“Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.”
— Virginia Woolf, Selected Letters
Tagged: Love, Literature, I Miss You, LDR
“Some people go to priests, others to poetry, I to my friends.”
— Virginia Woolf, Selected Works Of Virginia Woolf
Tagged: Friendship, Friends
“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.”
— Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary
Tagged: Anxiety, what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Mind, Examples of Similes
“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.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
Tagged: Introvert
“Oh the torture of never being left alone! I find it impossible to disentangle myself from those instincts, affections, passions, attachments…which bound me…from the first moment of consciousness to other people. I need solitude; I need to feel I belong to myself.’”
— Virginia Woolf, Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897 - 1909
Tagged: An Introverted Mind
“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Tagged: Life, Existential Crisis, Perspective
“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Solitude, Alone, Independence, Reflection, Introversion
“For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.”
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Tagged: Solitude, Alone
“To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!”
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Tagged: Read In Your 20s
“I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time… I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”
— Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf’s Suicide Letter and Its Cruel Misinterpretation in the Media
Tagged: Beautiful Last Words, Famous, Death, Life, Happiness, Sadness
“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Alone, Nothing
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Tagged: Writing, Writers
“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 or admires her understanding.”
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
Tagged: Dating, Respect, Love
“I am born entire, out of hatred, out of discord.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Hate, Cynic, Bitter, I Hate People, asshole
“She is rather like the winter sun–her ruddy edges slightly blurred.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf; Selected Diaries
Tagged: Wild Child, Nature
“–in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one’s kind.”
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Tagged: Happiness, Satisfaction
“I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.”
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Tagged: Be yourself, Social Anxiety, Pleasing Others, Impressing Others
“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Tagged: Be yourself, Chill, Impressing Others
“I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
Tagged: Reinvent Yourself, reinvention, Tired, Existential Crisis
“It is strange that we who are capable of so much suffering should inflict so much suffering.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: asshole, Suffering, Cruelty, Hate, humanity