Today about my favorite book, that’s more a poetry then a book really. When you think about Virginia Woolf, usually you think about sad things – after all she committed suicide. But for me – the first thing that comes to my mind – it’s a WORD. One juicy, beautiful word. She had an ability to pick words like you’re picking the perfect pearls for your necklace. That also happened in “The Waves”. This book doesn’t really have any driven story. The characters are subtly revealed through the accumulation of their reflections on themselves and each other. I have three versions of “The Waves”: Polish, English and Portuguese one. On the first version that I bought I wrote my own observations and I highlighted my favorite quotes. Here r some of them. I hope you will appreciate every word that is building this Virginia’s constructions.
This quote is from the end of Woolf’s novel The Waves, chosen by Leonard Woolf for the memorial plaque he put in their backyard.
“Death is the enemy. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding o Death! The waves broke on the shore.”
“There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star: ‘Consume me’”
“I wish to go under; to visit the profound depths; once in awhile to exercise my prerogative not always to act but explore; to hear vague, ancestral sounds of boughs creaking, of mammoths, to indulge impossible desires, to embrace the whole world with the arms of understanding, impossible to those who act.”
“I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.”
“Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.”
“Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief”
“Agora, só me resta embrulhar a minha dor neste lenço”
“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
“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.”
“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
redpoppyseeds 