Virginia Woolf Quotes

My mind is a chest of drawers. When I wish to deal with a subject, I shut all the drawers but the one in which the subject is to be found. When I am wearied, I shut all the drawers and go to sleep.

Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order.

A reader ought to be able to hold it and become familiar with its organized contents and make it a mind's manageable companion.

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.

I have a mess in my head sometimes, and there's something very satisfying about putting it into words. Certainly it's not something that you're in charge of, necessarily, but writing about it, putting it into your words, can be a very powerful experience.

Something different happens to my brain when I put pen to paper: the pace of writing or drawing slows you down and gives you more time for thoughts to come in.

You must take a definite idea, set it in the centre of your thinking, and then logically arrange your furthest thoughts in such a way that they are all closely linked with the original idea. Even if you do this for only a minute, it can be of great importance for the rhythm of the physical and etheric bodies.

I find it easier to tell someone what's in my head once it's on paper, rather than write with someone in mind.

This is probably an asset that my wife hates, where you compartmentalize. Most times, I think it's an asset, where you can just sort of feel like you chop off one part of your brain to do the next thing that you've got to do.

Writing, for me, is an extension of thinking - it's my way of processing, and only when I've gotten something down on the page have I thought through it fully.

But there are definitely times when I just need to write to clarify my thoughts and put any doubts to bed.

That's the way the mind works: the brain is genetically disposed towards organization, yet if not controlled, will link even the most imagerial fragment to another on the flimsiest pretense and in the most freewheeling manner, as if it takes a kind of organic pleasure in creative association, without regards to logic or chronological sequence.

A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.

We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.

Remember that feelings or emotions emanate from the more ancient, less evolved, lower part of the human brain, while thoughts are a product of our highly evolved, uniquely human, outer part of the brain.

Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it.

An idea so luminous flashed across her brain that she almost thought the room had leaped into light.

Your eyes is camera and your brain is a file cabinet.

Although we tend to think of the brain as a discrete organ - a lump of squidgy tissue - it is better to think of it as part of an elaborate network of nervous tissue that reaches out to every single part of the body.

But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects... like some trick of magic each object is loosed into a group of impressions - colour, odour, texture... And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world... the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind.

It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

A man by tumbling his thoughts, and forming them into expressions, gives them a new fermentation, which works them into a finer body.

When I close my eyes my vision is even more powerful.

He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash and hush of the sea.

Some may be helped by images, some may not. Some require an image outside, others one inside the brain.