Virginia Woolf Letters To Vita Quotes

Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this —But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.

Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest? Probably the latter is safer; but I hate safety, and would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed.

I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross; that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. [VW]

Like a little warm coal in my heart burns your saying that you miss me. I miss you oh so much. How much, you’ll never believe or know. At every moment of the day. It is painful but also rather pleasant, if you know what I mean. I mean, that it is good to have so keen and persistent a feeling about somebody. It is a sign of vitality.

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone. I just miss you...

With me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed, and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.

You will get letters, very reasoned and illuminating, from many people; I cannot write you that sort of letter now, I can only tell you that I am shaken, which may seem to you useless and silly, but which is really a greater tribute than pages of calm appreciation...

Don't mind being as miserable as you like with me - I have a great turn that way myself - [VW]

And still the strange meaningless conversations continue, and I wonder more and more at the fabric which nets the world together, so that anything which I do finally incubate out of my system into words will quite certainly be about solitude. Solitude and the desirability of it, if one is to achieve anything like continuity in life, is the one idea I find in the resounding vacancy which is my head.

Virginia wasn’t all cool intellect by any means. She had the warmest and deepest and most human of affections for those she loved. They were few, perhaps, and she applied alarmingly high standards, but her love and humanity were real, once they were given.

Yes, dearest Vita: I do miss you; I think of you: I have a million things, not so much to say, as to sink into you.

It is only that I want to be with you and not with anybody else - but you would get bored if I go on saying this, only it comes back and back till it drips of my pen.

I've just stopped talking to you. It seems so strange. It's perfectly peaceful here--they're playing bowls--I'd just put flowers in your room. And there you sit with the bombs falling around you. What can one say-- except that I love you and I've got to live through this strange quiet evening thinking of you sitting there alone. Dearest-- let me have a line... You have given me such happiness...

I think I won't come on Thursday for this reason; I must get on with writing; you would seduce me completely [...]

I have a perfectly romantic and no doubt untrue vision of you in my mind – stamping out the hops in a great vat in Kent – stark naked, brown as a satyr, and very beautiful. Don't tell me this is all illusion [...]

Yes, I miss you, I miss you.

Tomorrow I dine with my darling Mrs Woolf at Richmond [...] I love Mrs Woolf with a sick passion. So will you. In fact I don't think I will let you know her.

You angel, you have written. [...] Please, in all this muddle of life, continue to be a bright and constant star. Just a few things remain as beacons: poetry, and you, and solitude. You see that I am extremely sentimental. Had you suspected that?

Talk of solitude (...). It is the last resort of the civilised: our souls are so creased and soured in meaning we can only unfold them when we are alone. (5/4/1927 - From a Letter to Vita Sackville-West)

I miss you even more than I could have believed ;and I was prepared to miss you a good deal

Somehow it's dull and damp. I have been dull; I have missed you. I do miss you. I shall miss you. And if you don't believe it, you're a long-eared owl and ass. Lovely phrases?

Dined with Virginia at Richmond. She is as delicious as ever.

No, I am in no muddles [...] Virginia – not a muddle exactly; she is a busy and sensible woman. But she does love me, and I did sleep with her at Rodmell. That does not constitute a muddle though.

You see it is so easy for you sitting in Tavistock Square to look inward; but I find it very difficult to look inward when I am also looking at the coast of Sinai; and very difficult to look at the coast of Sinai when I am also looking inward and finding the image of Virginia everywhere.

This is how you must imagine your letters arriving, and me carrying them off to read in peace, and saying 'oh darling Virginia', and smiling to myself, and reading them all over again. Whereas mine just come with the postman.

Vita comes to lunch tomorrow, which will be a great amusement and pleasure. I am amused at my relations with her: left so ardent in January – and now what? Also I like her presence and her beauty. Am I in love with her? But what is love? Her being 'in love' with me, excites and flatters; and interests. What is this 'love'?

My bed's at least nine foot wide, and I feel like the Princes and the Pea, - only there is no Pea. It is a four-poster, all of which I like. Come and see for yourself.

I find life altogether intoxicating, – its pain no less than its pleasure, – in which Virginia plays no mean part.

Lunched with Virginia in Tavistock Square, where she has just arrived. The first time that I have been alone with her for long. Went on to see Mama, my head swimming with Virginia.

Yes, I miss you, I miss you. I dare not expatiate, because you will say I am not stark, and cannot feel the things dumb people feel. You know that is rather rotten rot, my dear Vita. After all, what is a lovely phrase? One that has mopped up as much Truth as it can hold.

I enjoyed your intimate letter from the Dolomites. It gave me a great deal of pain – which is I've no doubt the first stage of intimacy – no friends, no heart, only an indifferent head. Never mind: I enjoyed your abuse very much [...] But I will not go on else I should write you a really intimate letter, and then you would dislike me, more, even more, than you do.

Clive follows me all over the place. Have I been to bed with Virginia yet? If not, am I likely to do so in the near future? If not, will I please give it my attention? As it is high time Virginia fell in love.

[Virginia] is an exquisite companion, and I love her dearly. She has to stay in bed till luncheon, as she is still far from well, and she has lots of lessons to do. Leonard is coming on Saturday [...] Please don't think that a) I shall fall in love with Virginia b) Virginia will fall in love with me c) Leonard """""" d) I shall fall """ Leonard Because it is not so [...]

I like her being honourable, and she is it; a perfect lady, with all the dash and courage of the aristocracy, and less of its childishness than I expected. She is like an over ripe grape in features, moustached, pouting, will be a little heavy; meanwhile, she strides on fine legs, in a well cut skirt, and though embarrassing at breakfast, has a manly good sense and simplicity about her which both L. and I find satisfactory. Oh yes, I like her; could tack her on to my equipage for all time; and suppose if life allowed, this might be a friendship of a sort.

Do you know it was four weeks yesterday that you went? Yes, I often think of you, instead of my novel; I want to take you over the water meadows in the summer on foot, I have thought of many million things to tell you. Devil that you are, to vanish to Persia and leave me here! [...] And, dearest Vita, we are having two water-closets made, one paid for by Mrs Dalloway, the other by The Common Reader: both dedicated to you.

Like a little warm coal in my heart burns your saying that you miss me. I miss you oh so much. How much, you'll never believe or know. At every moment of the day. It is painful but also rather pleasant, if you know what I mean. I mean, that it is good to have so keen and persistent a feeling about somebody.

Vita has been twice. She is doomed to go to Persia; and I mind the thought so much (thinking to lose sight of her for five years) that I conclude I am genuinely fond of her.

Clive with his tongue well-loosened, imagine my horror when he suddenly said, 'I wonder if I dare ask Vita a very indiscreet question?' and I, being innocent and off my guard, said yes he might, and he came out with 'Have you ever gone to bed with Virginia?' but I think my 'NEVER!' convinced him and everybody else of the truth. This will show you what the conversation was like!

What I should really like to do would be to take you to some absurdly romantic place, ― vain dream, alas! What with Leonard and the Press ― Besides, by romantic I mean Persia or China, not Tintagel or Kergarnec. Oh what fun it would be, and Virginia's eyes would grow rounder and rounder, and presently it would all flow like water from a Sparklets siphon, turned into beautiful bubbles.

I simply adore Virginia Woolf, and so would you. You would fall quite flat before her charm and personality. [...] Mrs. Woolf is so simple: she does give the impression of something big. She is utterly unaffected: there is no outward adornments -- she dresses quite atrociously. At first you think she is plain; then a sort of spiritual beauty imposes itself on you, and you find a fascination in watching her. She was smarter last night; that is to say, the woolen orange stockings were replaced by yellow silk ones, but she still wore the pumps. She is both detached and human, silent till she wants to say something, and then says it supremely well. She is quite old. I've rarely taken such a fancy to anyone, and I think she likes me. At least, she's asked me to Richmond where she lives. Darling, I have quite lost my heart.

All these ancestors and centuries, and silver and gold, have bred a perfect body. She is stag like, or race horse like, save for the face, which pouts, and has no very sharp brain. But as a body hers is perfection. So many rare and curious objects hit one's brain like pellets which perhaps unfold later. But it's the breeding of Vita's that I took away with me as an impression, carrying her and Knole in my eye [...]

I look on my friendship with her as a treasure and a privilege. I shan't ever fall in love with her, padlock, but I am absolutely devoted to her and if she died I should mind quite, quite dreadfully. Or went mad again.

I am sitting up in bed: I am very very charming; and Vita is a dear old rough coated sheep dog: or alternatively, hung with grapes, pink with pearls, lustrous, candle lit, in the door of a Sevenoaks draper [...] Ah, but I like being with Vita.

I don't want to get landed in an affair which might get beyond my control before I knew where I was. [...] But darling, Virginia is not the sort of person one thinks of in that way. There is something incongruous and almost indecent in the idea. I have gone to bed with her (twice), but that's all. Now you know all about it, and I hope I haven't shocked you [...]

Ho l'illusione per un momento che qualcosa aderisca, acquisti peso, profondità, pienezza, sia completa. Così, per un momento, sembra la mia vita. Se fosse possibile, te la offrirei tutta intera. La staccherei dal ramo come si stacca un grappolo d'uva. Direi: "Prendila. È la mia vita". [...] Ma per farti capire, per consegnarti la mia vita, devo raccontarti una storia - e sono tante, così tante, le storie - storie di infanzia, storie di scuola, di amore, di matrimonio, di morte ecc. ecc. Nessuna è vera. Eppure, come bambini ci raccontiamo delle storie, e per adornarle inventiamo queste belle frasi, ridicole, sgargianti. Come sono stanco di storie, come sono stanco di frasi che escono così bene, con tanto di piedi per terra! E come non mi fido di quei bei progetti di vita, così precisi, tracciati su un foglio di carta da lettere. Comincio a desiderare un linguaggio a parte, come quello degli innamorati, parole smozzicate, inarticolate, simili allo scalpiccio dei piedi sul selciato. Comincio a cercare un progetto che si accordi meglio con i momenti di umiliazione e di vittoria che innegabilmente di quando in quando capitano a tutti.

ON 26 July 1926, Vita Sackville-West gave the Woolfs a cocker spaniel puppy which they named Pinka (or Pinker). She ate holes in Virginia’s skirt and devoured Leonard’s proofs. “But”, writes Virginia, “she is an angel of light. Leonard says seriously she makes him believe in God . . . and this after she has wetted his floor 8 times in one day”. For nine years Pinka was the much loved companion of both Leonard and Virginia, though in time she became essentially Leonard’s dog. Loved as she was, the pattern of her life naturally became woven into the pattern of theirs. The daily habits; her walk with Leonard round Tavistock Square garden in the morning before the day’s work began. Her joke of extinguishing, with her paw, Virginia’s match when she lit a cigarette, and so on. Virginia mentions her again and again in letters and diaries.

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this —But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it

her real claim to consideration is, if I may be so coarse, her legs. Oh they are exquisite – running like slender pillars up into her trunk, which is that of a breastless cuirassier (yet she has 2 children) but all about her is virginal, savage, patrician [...]

Tal vez escribir cartas a una mujer sea como […]. Creo que, al enfriar la emoción con lenguaje, las cartas de amor sin amor logran con mayor éxito la contención que vuelve carne y fluido el delirio amoroso. Virginia espera dejar atrás la cama y retomar su batalla contra el mundo: «Y no estás aquí para transformarme». ¿Qué único poder debería tener una mujer sobre otra sino el de transformarla? ¿Os suena de algo, señora? En sus cartas Virginia le reclama a Vita que la acuse de no tener sentimientos o de inventarse «frases encantadoras» que «le restan aspectos a la realidad». Sobra vida en Vita”. [...] ¿Qué puedo decir sobre eso sino sentirme más Vita que Virginia y a veces más Virginia que Vita? ¿En cuál de ellas se reconoce usted? Virginia insiste en que ella intenta decir lo que siente. Pero entiendo que no sea suficiente para Vita, que busca algo más. Woolf aúlla por historias frescas. Y Vita las tiene, las genera, las encarna. [...] Todo lo que latió en el encuentro entre estas dos mujeres, pero lo que se recordará será un gran libro, mi bien, otro libro de Virginia Woolf (y este puñado de cartas como anexo, un mapa alternativo de lectura). Ningún libro de Vita. Que salió a juguetear en los bosques con Mary Campbell, con Mary Carmichael o Mary Seton, mientras Virginia parecía celebrar sus trucos y reírle las gracias con deleite: «Ninguna de esas soy yo, maldita seas. En fin». Tan distante, tan razonable, tan, en fin, europea” [...] Perdone que me desvíe con asuntos mundanos. Perdone que centre todo en el amor. Es verdad, parece un vicio sentir y resentir que haya sido una mujer la que derribara más muros que nadie [...] Quizá solo he querido regalarle estas cartas para invitarla a poner una vela en el altar fascinante de la creación colaborativa que es la pasión lésbica, tan parecida al deseo por una misma. Dígame por favor si me invento este romance porque entonces saldré a celebrarlo. Su burra Gabriela W.

But it is a great comfort to think of you when I'm not well – I wonder why. Still nicer – better to see you. So I hope for Tuesday.

I miss you horribly, and apart from that am permanently infuriated by the thought of what you could make of this country if only you could be got here. You see, you ought to.

And, – mark, – I do care so satisfactorily for the few people that matter to me. (For Virginia? Oh dear me YES, for Virginia.)

I think she is one of the most mentally exciting people I know. She hates the wishy-washiness of Bloomsbury young men. We have made friends by leaps and bounds, in these two days. I love her, but couldn't fall 'in love' with her, so don't be nervous!

We had a surprise visit from the Nicolsons. She is a pronounced Sapphist, and may, thinks Ethel Sands, have an eye on me, old though I am. Snob as I am, I trace her passions five hundred years back, and they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine.

Altogether after reading your letter I felt like a stroked cat.

So dull, I am; dull outwardly, at least; all oafish and muddy; but not dull inside. A week's solitude restores me to the sense that I am a person and not a rag-heap for other people to pick over.

I think, among other things, that a set hour is full of peril; what one wants is the sudden desultory talk,—the look-up from the book one is reading, the burst of argument between two regions of silence.

And then, I don't believe one ever knows people in their own surroundings; one only knows them away, divorced from all the little strings and cobwebs of habit. Long Barn, Knole, Richmond, and Bloomsbury. All too familiar and entrapping. Either I am at home, and you are strange; or you are at home, and I am strange; so neither is the real essential person, and confusion results. But in the Basque provinces, among a horde of zingaros, we should both be equally strange and equally real.

I like the sense of one lighted room in the house while all the rest of the house, and the world outside, is in darkness. Just one lamp falling on my paper; it gives a concentration, an intimacy. What bad mediums letters are; you will read this in daylight, and everything will look different. I think I feel night as poignantly as you feel the separateness of human beings; one of those convictions which are so personal, so sharp, they hurt. It seems to me that I only begin to live after the sun has gone down and the stars have come out.