This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having. Never pretend that children, for instance, can be replaced by other things.
Mind |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers’ breath, of ropes of pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.
Mind | Time | Understand |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
She left the room without looking in the glass. From which we deduce the fact, he said to himself, as if he were writing a novel, that Miss Sarah Pargiter has never attracted the love of men. Or had she? He did not know. These little snapshot pictures of people left much to be desired, these little surface pictures that one made, like a fly crawling over a face, and feeling, here’s the nose, here’s the brow.
Art | Heart | Love | Mind | Object | Sacred | Teach | Woman | Art |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Let us turn over the pages, and I will add, for your amusement, a comment in the margin.
Incoherent | Life | Life | Mind | Order | Thought | Thought |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was, however; there she was.
Beauty | Day | Ends | Husband | Mind | Praise | Reading | Time | Beauty | Think |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year. It increased, he said. Alas, perhaps, but one should be glad of it- it went on increasing in his experience.
Life | Life | Mind | Circumstance |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
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?
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.
Mind |
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
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 pendant 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, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw with me - some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity. Yet it is incredible that I should not be a great poet.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
If I could believe, said Rhoda, that I should grow old in pursuit and change, I should be rid of my fear: nothing persists. One moment does not lead to another. The door opens and the tiger leaps. You do not see me come... I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces. I have no end in view. I do not know how to run minute to minute, and hour to hour, solving them by some natural force until they make the whole and indivisible mass that you call life. Because you have an end in view--one person, is it, to sit beside, an idea is it, your beauty is it? I do not know--your days and hours pass like the boughs of forest trees and the smooth green of forest rides to a hound running in the scent.
Virginia Woolf, nee Stephen, fully Adeline Virginia Woolf
That is my face, said Rhoda, in the looking-glass behind Susan's shoulder - that is my face. But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here. I have no face. Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They sey Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.
How fortunate we were who still had hope I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die
Mind |