As my previous blog post details, I read "Moments of Being" this month. Here are my selected favorite quotes. I also picked up some new vocabulary words.
"the effect of death upon those that live is always strange, and often terrible in the havoc it makes with innocent desires."
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976, p. 32
"At times I can go back to St Ives more completely than I can this morning. I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen. In certain favourable moods, memories – what one has forgotten – come to the top. Now if this is so, is it not possible – I often wonder – that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them?"
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976, p. 67
"Every day includes much more non-being than being...These separate moments of being were however embedded in many more moments of non-being. I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea; although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool. This is always so. A great part of every day is not lived consciously."
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976, p. 70
"From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art."
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976, p. 72
"[Stella had] that attitude of devotion, almost canine in its touching adoration, to her mother; that passive, suffering affection; and also that complete unquestioning dependence.
"They were sun and moon to each other; my mother the positive and definite; Stella the reflecting and satellite. My mother was stern to her. All her devotion was given to George who was like his father; and her care was for Gerald, born posthumously and very delicate. Stella she treated severely... she was hard on Stella because she felt Stella “part of myself”."
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976, p. 96
"[Stella] remains quite distinct in my mind. What is odd is that I cannot compare her either in character or face with anyone else. What she would have looked like now in a room full of other people I cannot imagine; or how she would have talked. I have never seen anyone who reminded me of her; and that is true too of my mother. They do not blend in the world of the living at all."
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976, p. 97
"The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else... The present must be smooth, habitual... [Any break] turns the depth into hard thin splinters."
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976, p. 98
"Subconsciously I knew that he meant that his sexual desires tore him asunder, together with his anguish at her loss. Both were torturing him."
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976, p. 121
"That is one of the aspects of death which is left out when people talk of the message of sorrow: they never mention its unbecoming side: its legacy of bitterness, bad temper, ill adjustment."
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976, p. 123
"Men of genius are very ill to live with...But there are certain qualifications to be noted. These scenes were never indulged in before men... Why had he [Leslie Stephen] no shame in front of women? Partly of course because the woman was his slave—being the most typical of Victorians...His dependence upon women perhaps explains that...He needed always a woman to sympathize, to flatter, to console. Why? Because he was conscious of his failure as a philospher, as a writer. But his creed made him ashamed to confess this need of sympathy to men...her [Vanessa's] refusal to accept her role, part slave, part angel of sympathy exacerbated him so that he was probably unconscious of his own barbarous violence..."
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976, p. 125
"The cruel thing was that while we could see the future, we were completely in the power of the past."
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976, p. 126
"What would have been his shape had he not been stamped and moulded by the patriarchal machinery? Every one of our male relations was shot into that machine...It is impossible to think of them as natural human beings as it is to think of a plough horse galloping wild and unshod in the street."
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976, p. 132
"Here the other motive came in—his desire to make us accept his views: his desire to make us pay our tribute to his own faith."
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976, p. 133
"absolute frankness, even among the most intimate, tends to be relative frankness"
Leonard Woolf qtd. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976, p. 139
"Yes, the old ladies of Kensington and Belgravia never knew that George Duckworth was not only father and mother, brother and sister to those poor Stephen girls; he was their lover also."
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976, p. 155
"Why, I asked, had we nothing to say to each other? Why were the most gifted of people also the most barren? Why were the most stimulating of friendships also the most deadening? Why was it all so negative? Why did these young men make one feel that one could not honestly be anything? The answer to all my questions was, obviously – as you will have guessed – that there was no physical attraction between us."
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976, p. 172
"We discussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of good...When all intellectual questions had been debated so freely, sex was ignored. Now a flood of light poured in upon that department too. We had known everything but we had never talked. Now we talked of nothing else."
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976, p. 174