Letters of Leonard Woolf Quotes

“I get your moments when nothing seems to matter & I suppose that most of the time we, or I at any rate, are passively inert to happiness or unhappiness. I mean that we are so persistently automatic that most of the day is a trance. When I do think or feel, it is usually with rage or despair. Don’t you feel often or always that there is so little time to lose, & that we are losing it so fast. The Christians are right there, I feel, it wouldn’t matter if there were another life, if there were some chance of making up for the time we are cruelly forced to lose here. But to be hurrying to annihilation, & only to have lived for a hour or two out of twenty five years! And you say, as they all would say, ‘I feel it’s an episode’: you don’t seem to see that in a few minutes we shall be old & in a few hours dead, that it’s an episode between youth & life, & sterility & annihilation.”
― Leonard Woolf, Letters of Leonard Woolf

“Life consisted of a few isolated flashes of existence, oases in a great wilderness of boredom. We live once perhaps in a week, sometimes perhaps in a year. I incline for the moment to the belief—it is in the Symposium almost—that Life is only a striving, to make two souls into one, to complete the bisected mystic circle. Each soul is but a half circle, there is somewhere its complement & we are all striving, searching to find the other half. Sometimes we find one that is almost—but not quite—the complement, the soul of a man or woman alive or the soul of a dead man living in music or poem—& there is a flash of soul fire & for a moment we live. But the flame dies down for the circle was not complete & then the old wandering in the wilderness of Boredom begins again. If only one could really complete the circle! Poets, artists & musicians are the happiest—for they create another soul out of their own & these two half circles—the old & the self-created souls—join & there is a flash that never dies down & they always live.”
― Leonard Woolf, Letters of Leonard Woolf

“It’s a sort of dull unhappiness that comes from isolation & blankness & monotony. It is quite different to the dullness & melancholia at home; I believe people have it sometimes in Kipling & it is, I think, in the air of the country. I went for a walk the other night by the side of the lagoon at sunset; the beauty of it was supreme with the bright green of the paddy fields, the masses of palms, the sky every shade of red & yellow, & the sea every shade of blue; but for all the brilliancy of colour there was a heavy melancholy over it all.”
― Leonard Woolf, Letters of Leonard Woolf