magiadoreal

I think the poverty of life now is what comes to me. (...) The substance gone out of everything. Quentin Bell, V. Woolf - A Biography, p. 179.

To know the psyche of Virginia Woolf, and this is what she is asking of a biographer, one would have to be God or Virginia, preferably Gpd. Looking from outside, one can go no further than what I have called the outline and for the rest one may guess, one may even to  build upon one's divinations, but never for a moment allowing oneself to forget that this is guesswork and guesswork of a most hazardous kind. V. Woolf - A Biography , Quentin Bell, vol.2, p. 109.

November 1918, which brought the armistice, brought also the end of Night and Day - the last word were written on 21 november; it also brought Virginia a new friend, T.S. Elliot. He came to Hogarth House on 15 november bringing with him three or four poems. Mr. Elliot himself appeared to Virginia a polish, cultivated, elaborate young American, and almost too decorous; but very intelligent and very much a poet. He was very firm in his opinions, which were not Virginia's, for he thought Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis great men, and admired James Joyce immensely. Quentin Bell, V. Woolf - A Biography , p. 63.

She had grown more angular, more bony, more austere; she had lost whatever prettiness she may have possessed; but certainly she continued to be very beautiful. (...) A ciné-camera could in ten seconds have caught the essential quality that is lacking in the still image; for it was in movement that she was most truly herself. Quentin Bell, V. Woolf - A Biography , p.96

My dear Virginia, i must write to you before I go to bed & can, I think, probably think more calmly. I have not got any very clear recolletction of what I really said to you this afternoon but I am sure you know why I came - I don't mean merely that I was in love but that that together with uncertainty drives one to do these things. Perhaps I was wrong, for before this week I was always intended not to tell you unless I felt sure that you were in love & would marry me. I thought then that you liked me but that was all. I never realized how much I loved you until we talked about my going back to Ceylon. After that I could think about nothing else but you. I got into a state of hopeless uncertainty, whether you loved me ou could ever love me or even like me. God, I hope i shall never spend such a time again as I spent here until I telegraphed. I wrote to you once saying I would speak to you next Monday but then I felt I should be mad if I waited until then to see you. So I w...

But my present feeling is that this vague & dream like world, without love, or heart, or passion or sex, is the only world i really care about, & find interesting. For, though they are dreams to you, & I can't express them at all adequately, these things are perfectly real to me. Quentin Bell, V. Woolf - A Biography , p. 126.

I look at a fresco by [Pietro] Perugino. I conceive that he saw things grouped, contained in certain and invariable forms; expressed in faces, actions [?which] did not exist; all beauty was contained in the momentary appearence of human beings. He saw it sealed as it were; all its worth in it; not a hint of fear or future. His fresco seems to me infinitely silent; as though beauty had swum up to the top and stayed there, above everything else, speech, paths leading on, relation of brain to brain, don't exist. Each part has a dependence upon the others; they compose one idea in his mind. That idea has nothing to do with anything that can be put into words. A group stands without relation to the figure of God. They have come together then because their lines and colours are related, and express some view of beauty in his brain. As for writing - I want to express beauty too - but beauty (simmetry?) of life and the world in action. Conflict? - is that it? If there is action in pa...

But she did not fail always socially; the desire to suceed, though not quiet in the way that George envisaged, was there. Few girls, conscious that they had more than their fair share of wits and beauty, could altogether renounce the beau monde at whose doors Virginia found herself. She could see clearly enough that most of its inhabitants were stupid; she could see that sucess, as George understood sucess, was a pretty dismal thing. There was much in Good Society that she found hateful and frightening; but there was always something in it that she loved. To be at the centre of things, to know people who disposed of enormous power, who could take certain graces and prerogatives for granted, to mingle with the decorative and the decorated world, to hear the butler announce a name that was old when Shakespeare was alive , these were things she could never be wholly indiferent. Quentin Bell, V.Woolf - A Biography , p. 79-80 (grifo meu)

A first experience of loving or being loved may be enchanting, desolating, embarassing or even boring; but it should no be disgusting. Quentin Bell, V. Woolf - A Biography , p.44

Between them there grew up a close friendship, but it was at once understood that it was to remain fraternal; each had a requiem candle to burn before the altar of the dead. Quentin Bell, V. Woolf - A Biography , p. 13

She had, one might say, renounced the world, or at least she had renounced the happiness of the world, although this renunciation could hardly be called mystical, one of the consequences of her bereavement being a permanent loss of faith. Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf - A Biography , p. 13

He was desperetaly shy, he was intensely pessimistic. He was so convinced of his own personal ugliness that he would not have a mirror in his room. He would shut his eyes rather than face an interlocutor. He wish he had been a clergyman, a recluse, anything but what he was. He was terrified of being confortable and although he would not deny pleasure to others he was anxious to deny himself. Once he tasted a cigar and liked it so much that he resolved never to taste another. Quentin Bell, V. Woolf - A Biography , p. 5.