Virginia Woolf Quotes

This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!

Study the teachings of the pine tree, the bamboo, and the plum blossom. The pine is evergreen, firmly rooted, and venerable. The bamboo is strong, resilient, unbreakable. The plum blossom is hardy, fragrant, and elegant.

Shigure Sohma: Tohru's very cute in a sweet sort of way. Hatori Sohma: For some reason when you say that it reeks of something illegal.

XI I sang his name instead of song; Over and over I sang his name: Backward and forward I sang it along, With my sweetest notes, it was still the same! I sang it low, that the slave-girls near Might never guess, from what they could hear, That all the song was a name.

From the pine tree, learn of the pine tree; And from the bamboo, of the bamboo

An autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell... the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.

A composition which dazzles at first sight by gaudy epithets, or brilliant turns or expression, or glittering trains of imagery, may fade gradually from the mind, leaving no enduring impression; but words which flow fresh and warm from a full heart, and which are instinct with the life and breath of human feeling, pass into household memories, and partake of the immortality of the affections from which they spring.

The hardest thing for everyone, for the writer, for the director and certainly for the actors, is not to panic when they're doing a certain line for the tenth time because everything ceases to be funny after it's been repeated.

Tree limbs rise and fall like the ecstatic arms of those who have submitted to the mystical life. Leaf sounds talk together like poets making fresh metaphors.

The fly sat upon the axel-tree of the chariot-wheel and said, 'What a dust do I raise!'

Lord, when my spirit shall return to thee, At the foot of a friendly tree let my body be buried, That this dust may rise and rejoice among the branches.

It is my soul that calls upon my name; How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night, like softest music to attending ears! -Romeo

Also pay attention if a tree or whatnot says something about two bulls.

I sweet potato what I sweet potato.

But the trees were gorgeous in their autumnal leafiness - the warm odours of flowers and herb came sweet upon the sense.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

When we complain of having to do the same thing over and over, let us remember that God does not send new trees, strange flowers and different grasses every year. When the spring winds blow, they blow in the same way. In the same places the same dear blossoms lift up the same sweet faces, yet they never weary us. When it rains, it rains as it always has. Even so would the same tasks which fill our daily lives put on new meanings if we wrought them in the spirit of renewal from within--a spirit of growth and beauty.

Writing, real writing, should leave a small sweet bruise somewhere on the writer . . . and on the reader.

What a name! Was it love or praise? Speech half-asleep or song half-awake? I must learn Spanish, one of these days, Only for that slow sweet name's sake.

I use a lot of similes and metaphors when I work, simply because it's my best way of describing a building or a scene. I'm terrible at describing landscapes - trees, buildings. The inanimate things don't interest me: I always think, "Oh, no, here comes another building I have to describe." So I usually use a simile or metaphor.

To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachable of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art.

I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is prest Against the earth's sweet flowing breast.

In discourse more sweet; For eloquence the soul, song charms the sense. Others apart sat on a hill retir'd, In thoughts more elevate, and reason'd high Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fix'd fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute; And found no end, in wand'ring mazes lost.