“I cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or mix with other people.”
—Virginia Woolf, from The Waves (via violentwavesofemotion)
May 2013
1 post
April 2013
7 posts
“
Dearest,
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 begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.
I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.
V.
” —Virginia Woolf’s letter to Leonard.
“And yet the only exciting life is the imaginary one.”
—VIrginia Woolf , A Writer’s Diary.
“If someone asks me, “Why do you write?” I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, “Why do you write the way you do?” I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world—every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste.”
—William Gass (via austinkleon)
“Something within her refused to grow. Something endless, eternal. Something bold. Something warrior-like. She looked up at the stars, she could feel, she felt as if she could pluck them one by one and send them spinning into the world, like small beautiful elastic mercurial weapons. Now too, the time is coming.”
— Patti Smith’s beautiful tribute to Virginia Woolf, who took her own life on March 28, 1941. (via adamsreef)
March 2013
14 posts
“Isn’t it sad that no one really falls in love nowadays? It is the rearest, rearest thing - I mean they don’t see each other ideally. They don’t feel that every word is something too wonderful just because the other has spoken it. Then again love means a great many things; and to confine it to romantic love is absurd. I find myself occasionally in love with entire groups of people or even landscapes; I’ve always been like that ever since I can remember.”
—Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 29 July 1918 (via violentwavesofemotion)
Ironic yet true in some parts.
Some things stay the same, while the other things left behind and transform into something called memory.
