The Death of the Moth and Other Essays Quotes

“It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

“It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

“Words... are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind....Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live — the mind — all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not about them, but about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed......Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, in paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

“All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

“The success of the masterpieces seems to lie not so much in their freedom from faults — indeed we tolerate the grossest errors in them all — but in the immense persuasiveness of a mind which has completely mastered its perspective.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

“Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellow-underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us. They are hybrid creatures, neither gay like butterflies nor sombre like their own species. Nevertheless the present specimen, with his narrow hay-coloured wings, fringed with a tassel of the same colour, seemed to be content with life.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

“Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

“It is ten years since Virginia Woolf published her last volume of collected essays, THE COMMON READER: SECOND SERIES. At the time of her death she was already engaged in getting together essays for a further volume, which she proposed to publish in the autumn of 1941 or the spring Of 1942. She also intended to publish a new book of short stories, including in it some or all of MONDAY OR TUESDAY, which has been long out of print. She left”
― Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

“Romaanin lukeminen on vaikea ja mutkikas taito. Ei riitä että pystyy erittäin hienojakoiseen havainnointiin, vaan mielikuvituksen on lisäksi oltava rohkea, jotta pystyy saamaan haltuunsa kaiken, mitä suuri romaanikirjailija – suuri taiteilija – antaa.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

“Olisi hyvä, jos ennen kuin alatte lukea luopuisitte ennakko-odotuksista. Älkää sanelko kirjailijallennne ehtoja vaan yrittäkää tulla häneksi. Olkaa hänen työtoverinsa ja avustajansa. Jos olette heti alkuun haluton, varautunut ja kriittinen, estätte itseänne saamasta kirjasta irti niin paljon kuin olisi mahdollista.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

“Ainoa neuvo, jonka ihminen voi toiselle lukemisesta antaa, on, että tämä ei kuuntelisi neuvoja vaan seuraisi vaistoaan, käyttäisi omaa järkeään, tekisi omat johtopäätöksensä.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

“Тъй като единственият съвет, който може да се даде за четенето, е, да не се приемат никакви съвети, да се следва собственият инстинкт, да се използва собственият разум, да се стига до собствени заключения.
из "Как трябва да се чете?”
― Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays