Virginia Woolf Quotes

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I would say leaf. I would say tree. I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews. I would roll like frenetic blood on the slow current of the eye of words turned into mad horses into fresh children into clots into curfew into vestiges of temples into precious stones remote enough to discourage miners. Whoever would not understand me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger.

It’s the same thing. Passion is passion. It’s the excitement between the tedious spaces, and it doesn’t matter where it’s directed.

We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.

Pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry.

Abruptly he thrust his snow-drenched leather gloves against my cheeks. I dodged. A raw carnal feeling blazed up within me, branding my cheeks. I felt myself staring at him with crystal clear eyes... From that time on I was in love with Omi.

Virgil, above all poets, had a stock which I may call almost inexhaustible, of figurative, elegant, and sounding words.

He bit the inside of his cheek, Death purring wildy. The pleasure of her touch, even one so innocent, rocked him to the core.

My heart is fluid and soaring. There's no longer any space between heartbeats.

Who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame

Painting or poetry is made as one makes love - a total embrace, prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back.

I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.

turns me on so loud it's like no sound, everybody yelling at me hands over their ears from behind a glass wall, faces working around in talk circles but no sound from the mouths. my sound soaks up all other sound.

When their lips met, and their tongues touched, it was like they were kissing in a hundred different places, and her senses were flooded with new sensations and old memoires. He kissed her, and their souls melted into each other in a melody older than time.

For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie smoothly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can't be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance.

What is poetry? Do not enquire. The secret dies by prying. How does the heart beat? I fainted when I saw it on the screen, opening and closing like a flower ... Poetry is like this, it is life moving, terrible, vivid. Look the other way when you write, or you might faint.

It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.

It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.

O that my tongue were in the thunder's mouth! Then with passion would I shake the world.

There's a fine line between pleasure and pain. Love me like a ball and chain.

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands.

My heart beats so hard it hurts, and I can't scream and I can't breathe, but I also feel everything, every vein and every fiber, every bone and every nerve, all awake and buzzing in my body as if charged with electricity. I am pure adrenaline.

Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer.

Of metaphors, those generally conduce most to energy or vivacity of style which illustrate an intellectual by a sensible object.