Virginia Woolf Quotes

The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

You always have to stimulate the senses.

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.

I'm constantly being visually stimulated.

I think sighted people let their eyes cheat them out of certain things. People who can see don't have a great sense of smell because they don't use it.

I think being deaf gave me an increased sense of sight.

What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.

I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I have not the magnificent richness of colouring that animates nature.

No mortal eye has ever fully seen a flash of lightning ... for no matter how firmly we look, our eyes are sure to be dazzled.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

When you look at a wall spotted with stains...you may discover a resemblance to various landscapes, beautiful with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees. Or again, you may see battles and figures in action, or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of objects which you could reduce to complete and well-drawn figures.

I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all.

The eye sees more than the heart knows.

What happens behind your eyes is more important than what happens in front of them. This is a reversal from the way that we have been taught and the way that we had experienced the world as five sensory humans.

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.

What we hear strikes the mind with less force than what we see.

We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.

But we have been taught to see before our eyes have found out a way of seeing for themselves.

It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual.

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.

The normal cut in a theatrical film is anywhere from 3 to 6 seconds. That means thousands of images in a film over a couple of hours. In Visitors the cuts come every 70-plus seconds. The point of view is that the stiller one can be the more open to their senses they become. The whole world is quick right now. If things can be slowed down they stay in memory longer.

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem. It makes sense in my own mind, but I'm trying to figure out a way to articulate it... It's like looking at a painting: you're able to take in the totality of the work all at once, and so processing whatever information that painting is giving you is almost secondary to simply apprehending what's in front of you.

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.