Virginia Woolf Quotes

'The Haunted Man' is about communication barriers between men and women, and in that song it's a woman's wait for her husband to come back from war. The vision for me was of a group of men and women on the opposite sides of two cliffs, trying to move or sing to each other and communicate, but they're kind of misfiring.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

That was one of the saddest things about people--their most important thoughts and feelings often went unspoken and barely understood.

We battle on in words, as always, mere words, and what's the cure? We cannot find a thing.

Every time I'm close to you, there's too much I can't say, and you just walk away. And I forgot to tell you I love you.

Communication: the thing humans forgot when we invented words.

Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.

We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it

They ended every speech with the word hiro, which means: like I said. Thus each man took responsibility for intruding into the inarticulate murmur of the spheres. To hiro they added the word koue, a cry of joy or distress, according to whether it was sung or howled. Thus they essayed to piece the mysterious curtain which hangs between all talking men: at the end of every utterance a man stepped back, so to speak, and attempted to interpret his words to the listener, attempted to subvert the beguiling intellect with the noise of true emotion.

The things she most wanted to tell him would lose their meaning the moment she put them into words.

They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong; they pass each other and keep running.

When a person knows and can't make the others understand, what does he do?

I had always suspected language was quite limited in its ability to communicate the intricate mysteries of truth.

I feel like the biggest failure of humans is miscommunication. We can't communicate with each other-we can fight, we can kill, we can do those things well.

We have years to converse with someone, to blurt and rant, to explain our desires and anger and regrets - and oh how we squander those moments.

If there is one general law of communication it is that we never communicate as effectively as we think we do.

One never discusses anything with anybody who can understand one discusses things with people who cannot understand.

What hurts the most is being misunderstood. They tell me that's an Aquarian trait - that that's the thing we don't like.

There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.

In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we ought to and not meaning what we do.

My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation, until all is said that words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption.

Our conversation with the supermarket manager had been about as helpful as a New Jersey road sign, and if you've ever been there, you know the signs don't tell you the exit you're coming up to, they only point out the exits you've just missed.

But they were fated to misunderstand each other.

Oh why do we not say the important things, it would be so easy, and we are damned because we do not.