Alyssa > Alyssa's Quotes

“So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted; solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Always (it was in her nature, or in her sex, she did not know which) before she exchanged the fluidity of life for the concentration of painting she had a few moments of nakedness when she seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body, hesitating on some windy pinnacle and exposed without protection to all the blasts of doubt. Why then did she do it? She looked at the canvas, lightly scored with running lines....What was the good of doing it then, and she heard some voice saying she couldn't paint, saying she couldn't create, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Today she would like to be alone in the sea: at ease in the water, letting herself go, without anyone calling her from the shore, without spectacular rescues. Simply in the water, with the violent sea she misses because she needs it more and more. Schedules disappeared during those vacations or were so radically modified that the rhythm they marked was almost her own. Lunch was not at one but at three; dinner not at nine but at eleven.”
― Sylvia Molloy, Certificate of Absence

“Her words, herself: broken up, pieced together. Today she falls to the ground, together with her words, but regains her footing: the words arise once more, as she herself rises. She is thankful for those undulating words that hold her again, caressing her body and
recognizing her scars. Her body and her phrase will tear again, but not at the old scars: they will split open in a different way, revealing new fractures. She accepts this future violence as something not necessarily negative, as a sign, perhaps, of a secret order.”
― Sylvia Molloy, Certificate of Absence