The comparison between Coleridge and Johnson is obvious in so far as each held sway chiefly by the power of his tongue. The difference between their methods is so marked that it is tempting, but also unnecessary, to judge one to be inferior to the other. Johnson was robust, combative, and concrete; Coleridge was the opposite. The contrast was perhaps in his mind when he said of Johnson: "his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced.
Virginia WoolfHow far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.
Virginia WoolfLet it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.
Virginia WoolfI do think all good and evil comes from words. I have to tune myself into a good temper with something musical, and I run to a book as a child to its mother.
Virginia WoolfAt one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever
Virginia WoolfReading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response).
Virginia WoolfIt seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.
Virginia WoolfIt 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.
Virginia Woolfmore and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will.
Virginia WoolfHuman beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
Virginia WoolfAre we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?
Virginia WoolfWho shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?
Virginia Woolfmadam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!" "I'm dead, sir!" she replied. A few minutes later, they became engaged.
Virginia WoolfThe telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.
Virginia WoolfThe profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait - whether to fish with worms or not.
Virginia WoolfOh, 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.
Virginia WoolfTo depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
Virginia WoolfSubmit to me." So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore, wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen alseep, she thought; were free like smoke, were free to come and go like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought.
Virginia WoolfThe root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.
Virginia WoolfHow 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?
Virginia WoolfWho would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?
Virginia WoolfLike all very handsome men who die tragically, he left not so much a character behind him as a legend. Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face.
Virginia WoolfKing old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always to to a good man, they say.
Virginia WoolfThere can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.
Virginia WoolfThe sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it.
Virginia WoolfWhat has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself- a voice answering a voice.
Virginia WoolfThe beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Virginia WoolfYou cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind.
Virginia WoolfI 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...so now, Mrs. Ramsay thought, she could return to that dream land, that unreal but fascinating place, the Manning's drawing-room at Marlow twenty years ago; where one moved about without haste or anxiety, for there was no future to worry about. She knew what had happened to them, what to her. It was like reading a good book again, for she knew the end of that story, since it had happened twenty years ago, and life, which shot down even from this dining-room table in cascades, heaven knows where, was sealed up there, and lay, like a lake, placidly between its banks.
Virginia Woolf... the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.
Virginia WoolfIt is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.
Virginia WoolfThe interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.
Virginia WoolfI enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?
Virginia Woolf