Woolf quotes - prelims 4

But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail

To the Lighthouse, p. 159, Lily and abstraction

counter[s] the desire to capture external facts by experimenting with varying degrees of abstraction

the sisters' arts, 1980

a consciousness of what I call 'reality': a thing I see before me: something abstract

diary sept 1928

In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning

On Being ill. subtext and illness

to evoke, when collected, a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain. Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness

On Being Ill, power of incomprehensibility

'I see a slab of pale yellow,' said Susan, 'spreading away until it meets a purple stripe'

The Waves, abstract colour, susan

It is a mistake, this extreme precision, this orderly and military progress; a convenience, a lie. There is always deep below it [...] a rushing stream of broken dreams

The Waves, narrative, truth, reality

To see things without attachment, from the outside […] pretence and make-believe and unreality are gone, and lightness has come with a kind of transparency, making oneself invisible and things seen through as one walks

The Waves, disinterested vision

But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space

The Waves, pain and words

I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am - Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs

The Waves, Bernard, merging of self

For I changed and changed; was Hamlet, was Shelley [...] but was Byron chiefly

Bernard, The Waves, multiple selves

People are collections of different selves: this is one of Woolf's basic beliefs

Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics, 2001. self

[Bernard's] transcendence of self is full insight into phenomena, as he becomes 'immeasurably receptive'

Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics, 2001. Bernard

Woolf's concerns over the solitary model of exclusively male poetic genius move her towards a collective and multiple sense of creative subjectivity

Goldman, Cambridge Companion. masculine and feminine selves

but to talk of separate people in the Waves may be to miss the point. Each is stained by the others

Goldman, Cambridge Companion. self in the waves

to read this poem one must have myriad eyes

Waves, vision and perception of literature

for the reading of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards

A Room of One's Own, intensity

[reality] overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech

A Room of One's Own, reality

she is inheritor as well as an originator

A Room of One's Own, inheritance

That was to be an abstract mystical eyeless book: a playpoem. And there may be affectation in being too mystical, too abstract

Diary, Nov 1928

Vanessa challenged the representational tradition of portrait painting by subordinating individualising details to larger visual patterns.

Gillespie, Edinburgh Companion - v. bell

for though they must part in the end, painting and writing have much to tell each other; they have much in common. The novelist after all wants to make us see

Walter Sickert, novels and paintings

But what sort of meaning is that which cannot be expressed in words? What is a picture when it has rid itself of the companionship of language and of music.

Walter Sickert, meaning and words.

In such a creative vision the objects as such tend to disappear, to lose their separate unities, and to take their places as so many bits in the whole mosaic of vision.

The Artist's Vision, Fry. abstract, mosaic.

in the imaginative life [...] the whole consciousness may be focussed upon the perceptive and the emotional aspects of the experience

An Essay In Aesthetics, Fry. emotion, perception, imagination

art, then, is an expression and a stimulus of this imaginative life

An Essay in Aesthetics, Fry. what art is.

'like' and 'like' and 'like' - but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?

The Waves, 107, rhoda. comparison and truth of reality

But how to describe the world seen without a self? There are no words.

The Waves, 192. selfless perception

I need no words. Nothing neat.

The Waves, 198. words and neatness

Our separate drops are dissolved; we are lost in the abysses of time, in the darkness

The Waves, 150 - merging of self into each other and into time