Virginia Woolf Quotes

In English, I'm a little bit limited. I speak English as a second language, and that's a little limitation that I have to work around and I have to use it to my favor. So, yes, that's why I end up wanting to do more things in Latin America.

I find it hard to write really cool texts in German. At some point I had the feeling that it didn't work for me any more. So I'd rather not write any German songs at all than write uncool ones.

We can only see as much and we can only go as far as our languages take us.

Words are an imperfect medium for explaining.

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.

When a tongue fails to send forth appropriate shafts, there might be a word to act as healer of these.

Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.

I begin indeed to fear that I have undertaken an impossibility, undertaken to tell what I cannot tell because no speech at my command will fit the forms in my mind.

He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mold of English, Petrus's story would come out arthritic, bygone"(117).

You might perhaps like to see the few canvases I was able to save from the bailiffs and the rest, since I thought you might be so good as to help me a little, as I am in quite a desperate state, and the worst is that I can no longer even work.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

One of the things that's good for me is that I can go from one art form to another. Because I think if I had to write another novel now I would really not be good in my head anymore. It's too much. The frustration is so intense of knowing that this structure is right around the corner. Writing is a particular kind of frustration.

to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.

I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.

I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture.

writers just kept on staring at nothing until they wrote something. Might be two minutes or two weeks.

Lacking many of the essential implements, it irritated me to be reduced to impotence in the face of artistic projects to which I had passionately given myself.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize

Pride dwells in the thought; the tongue can have but a very little share in it.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.

In a foreign country it is far from easy to study a scene at length when you know that at any minute someone may appear and ask what you are doing and that you can't answer, and you haven't many references, and you don't know the law. Neither is it easy to find and know the subjects for portraits or comfortable to make such picture when you cannot apply an anesthesia of small talk.

Whenever I see a Frans Hals I feel like painting, but when I see a Rembrandt I feel like giving up!

Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.