Name: Selected Diaries
ISBN: 9780099518259

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf turned to her diary as to an intimate friend, to whom she could freely and spontaneously confide her thoughts on public events or the joys and trials of domestic life. Between 1st January 1915 and her death in 1941 she regularly recorded her thoughts with unfailing grace, courage, honesty and wit. The result is one of the greatest diaries in the English language.

Selected Diaries

ame 

dima

i want to be through the splash and swimming in calm water again. i want to be writing unobserved.

we have bitten off a large piece of life–but why not?

she writes fifteen pages a day–knows everyone. but could i ever know her? the aristocratic manner is something like an actress’s–no false shyness or modesty–makes me feel virgin, shy, and schoolgirlish. she is grandier; hard; handsome; manly…

good resolutions wither because forced. and modern science teaches us to respect pleasure, or that is my reading.

indeed it is fatal to have visitors, in the middle of a story. all that agony now has to begin again. no one ever suffered so acutely from atmosphere as i do; and my leaves drooped one by one; though heaven knows my root is firm enough. the odd thing is that neither of us wishes for visitors. of course they threaten us from all sides - no: leave me, leave me, is all i say: to work in my brain.

however, i can't help thinking that we grow in cordiality, instead of drifting out of sight. and why not stand on one's own legs,, and defy them,

visitors leave on in tatters; yet with a relish for words. phrases roll on my tongue -

still, i think there is virtue and some lasting truth in first impressions; so i don't cancel mine.

a great many things have happened, unrecorded. 

sometimes i feel as if, instead of sleeping through the months in a dark room, i'd been up in the light all night.

my talk with tom deserves writing down. but won't get it for the light is fading; and one cannot write talk down either,

he thought that joyce did completely what he meant to do. but he did not think that he gave a new insight into human nature - said nothing new like tolstoy. (light now fails - 7.10 after a bad rainy day.)

and i am in one of my moods, as the nurses used to call it, today. and what is it and why? a desire for children, i suppose; for nessa's life; for the sense of flowers breaking all round me involuntarily.

for the sense of flowers breaking all round me involuntarily.

they make my life seem a little bare sometimes; and then my inveterate of suffering inwardly, stoically; of blazing my way through to the end - and so forth. and it is all temporary: yes let me be quite clear about that. 

years and years ago, i said to myself, walking up the hill at bayreuth, never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having; good advice i think. and then i went on to say to myself that one must like things for themselves; or rather, rid them of their bearing upon one's personal life. one must venture on to the things that exist independently of oneself. now this is very hard for young women to do. yet i got satisfaction from it...

perhaps i have been too happy for my soul's good? and does some of my discontent come from feeling that?

L, i think, suffers from his extreme clarity. he sees things so clear that he can't swim, float and speculate.

yet most of this is for my sake; and am i honest in wishing it otherwise? i will leave it here, unfinished, a note of interrogation - signifying some mood that recurs, but is not often expressed.

we were all easy and gifted and friendly and like good children rewarded by having the capacity for enjoying ourselves thus. i daresay no one said anything very brilliant. 

there is something indescribably congenial to me in this easy artists' talk; the values the same as my own and therefore right; ni impediments; life charming, good, and interesting; no effort; art brooding calmly over it all; and none of this attachment to mundane things,

katherine has been dead a week, and how far am i obeying her 'do not quite forget katherine' which i read in one of her old letters? it is strange to trace the progress of one's feelings.

it is strange to trace the progress of one's feelings.

grief, katherine mansfield, i love this page

at that one feels - what? a shock of relief? - a rival the less? the confusion at feeling so little - then gradually, blankness and disappointment; then a depression which i could not rouse myself from all that day. when i began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. katherine won't read it. katherine's my rival no longer. then as usual with me, visual impressions kept coming and coming before me - 

a certain melancholy has been brooding over me this fortnight. the feeling so often comes to me now - yes, go on writing of course but into emptiness.

however then i had my fever, and violent cold, was in and out of bed for a week. in casting accounts, never forget to begin with the state of the body.

i feel like i cant review this as i’d usually would since it’s a literal collection of her personal diary entries. it was definitely interesting and made me feel connected to her a lot (especially in the earlier entries) then as she got older it was obvs harder for me to relate so i put the book down often. i liked her sense of humor though and the funny entries and the ones about her personal life and thoughts about her books made me push trough it. as the war started it got much more fast paced and it wasn’t as lyrical so it got easier to read - i finished it after reading 80 pages in one day. 

Prashant Prasad

“distorted realities have always been my cup of tea”

Selected Diaries

Reviews

Highlights