LOVE WON'T SAVE US

posts tagged "virginia woolf"

"‘I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable,’ writes Virginia Woolf in The Waves. ‘I need a howl; a cry… I need no words.’ In The Voyage Out, she writes: ‘I want to write a novel about Silence.’

-Gretchen Henderson, On Marvellous Things Heard

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"Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death… others through sheer inability to cross the street."

She gazed back over the sea, at the island. But the leaf was losing its sharpness. It was very small; it was very distant. The sea was more important now than the shore. Waves were all round them, tossing and sinking, with a log wallowing down one wave; a gull riding on another. About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she murmured, dreamily, half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

-Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

I wish I had been at Rodmell
to parlay with Virginia Woolf
when she was about to take
that fatal walk:  “I know you’re
sick, but you’ll be well
again: trust me:  I’ve been there.”
Would I have offered to take
her place, for me to die
and she to live?  I think not.  Each
has his “fiery particle”
to fan into flame for his own
sake.  So, no.  But still I
wish I’d been there, before she
filled her pockets with stones
and lay down in the River Ouse.
Angular Virginia Woolf, for whom
words came streaming
like clouded yellows over the downs.
- James Schuyler