Virginia Woolf: Frasi in inglese (pagina 15)

“Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent.”

“The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.”

“For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said.”

“For nothing was simply one thing.”

“Night had come—night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day.”

“You’re the only person I’ve ever met who seems to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say a thing.”

“Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the center which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”

“Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order”

“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.”

“Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul.”

“When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre”

“For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn…”

“Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame”

“what she loved: life, London, this moment of June.”

“Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.”

“It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.”

“Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.”

“… I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.”

“so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again…”