Virginia Woolf citáty

page 13

„Niektorí ľudia chodia ku kňazom, iní k poézii, ja k priateľom.“

„Chcel som písať o smrti, lenže ako zvyčajne sa do toho vmiesil život.“

„A ty chceš byť básnikom; a ty chceš byť milencom.“

„Mám hlboko skrytú a nevyjadrenú túžbu po niečom, čo presahuje každodenný život.“

„Život je ťažký, fakty sú nekompromisné a prechod do tej bájnej krajiny, kde zhasínajú naše najjasnejšie nádeje a naše krehké kôpky sa utápajú v tme, si vyžaduje predovšetkým odvahu, pravdu a silu vydržať.“

„Ak nehovoríte pravdu o sebe, nemôžete ju hovoriť ani o iných ľuďoch.“

„Pani Dallowayová povedala, že kúpi kvety sama.“

„Umelec je koniec koncov osamelá bytosť.“

„Vyučovať a kázať asi presahuje ľudské schopnosti.“

„Prečo sú ženy … oveľa zaujímavejšie pre mužov ako muži pre ženy?“

„Je zvláštne, ako kreatívna sila privádza celý vesmír naraz do poriadku.“

„Pozoruj na okamih svoju bežnú myseľ v bežný deň.“

„Odvážila by som si tipnúť, že Anon, ktorý napísal toľko básní bez toho, aby ich podpísal, bola často žena.“

„Existuje zvláštna schopnosť meniť fakty silou predstavivosti.“

„Pokiaľ nie som sama sebou, nie som nikto.“

“No one can escape the power of language, let alone those of English birth brought up from childhood, as Mrs. Hilbery had been, to disport themselves now in the Saxon plainness, now in the Latin splendor of the tongue, and stored with memories, as she was, of old poets exuberating in an infinity of vocables. Even Katharine was slightly affected against her better judgment by her mother's enthusiasm. Not that her judgment could altogether acquiesce in the necessity for a study of Shakespeare's sonnets as a preliminary to the fifth chapter of her grandfather's biography. Beginning with a perfectly frivolous jest, Mrs. Hilbery had evolved a theory that Anne Hathaway had a way, among other things, of writing Shakespeare's sonnets; the idea, struck out to enliven a party of professors, who forwarded a number of privately printed manuals within the next few days for her instruction, had submerged her in a flood of Elizabethan literature; she had come half to believe in her joke, which was, she said, at least as good as other people's facts, and all her fancy for the time being centered upon Stratford-on-Avon.”

“Dearest,
I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that.
But I know that I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life. It is this madness. Nothing anyone says can persuade me. You can work, and you will be much better without me. You see I can't write this even, which shows I am right. All I want to say is that until this disease came on we were perfectly happy. It was all due to you. No one could have been so good as you have been, from the very first day till now. Everyone knows that.
V.”

“The flowers flashed before they faded. She watched them flash.”

“I must try to set aside half an hour in some part of my day, and consecrate it to diary writing. Give it a name and a place, and then perhaps, such is the human mind, I shall come to think it a duty, and disregard other duties for it.”

“I will use these last pages to sum up our circumstances. A map of the world. […]
I seldom see Lytton; that is true. The reason is that we don't fit in, I imagine, to his parties nor he to ours; but that if we can meet in solitude, all goes as usual. Yet what do one's friends mean to one, if one only sees them eight times a year? […]
I use my friends rather as giglamps: there's another field I see; by your light. Over there's a hill. I widen my landscape.”

“Mrs Swithin took her knitting from the table. 'Did you feel,' she asked, 'what he said: we act different parts but are the same?'
'Yes,' Isa answered. 'No,' she added. It was Yes, No. Yes, yes, yes, the tide rushed out embracing. No, no, no, it contracted.”

“Happily, at forty-six I still feel as experimental and on the verge of getting at the truth as ever.”

“She had done the usual trick – been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr Bankes) were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere.”

“A light here required a shadow there.”

“Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.”

“The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible.”

“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

“But look — he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gesture one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime.”

“Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it — the poets and novelists — can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does no exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma — a mirage.”

“Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.”

“But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets.”

“Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death… others through sheer inability to cross the street.”

“Directly the mulberry tree begins to make you circle, break off. Pelt the tree with laughter.”

“While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace.”

“What she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here there, she survived. Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.”

“An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw?”