Bloomsbury Group Quotes

“Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people.”
― Leonard Woolf

“Nothing matters. You get yourself into a state in which you imagine things which have no basis in reality... One begins for some reason to worry about something and, if one allows oneself to go on doing that, one gradually imagines all kinds of things. It is a kind of self-indulgence and one gets into a perpetual daydream. It is essential to stop this process and face the real world -- which is never so bad as all that.”
― Leonard Woolf

“It remains a mystery to me why some of that [pulp] fiction should be judged inferior to the rafts and rafts of bad social [literary] fiction which continues to be treated by literary editors as if it were somehow superior, or at least worthier of our attention. The careerist literary imperialism of the Bloomsbury years did a lot to produce fiction's present unseemly polarities.”
― Michael Moorcock

“Nothing matters.”
― Leonard Woolf

“It is never right for any individual or government to do any vast evil as a means to some hypothetical good.”
― Leonard Woolf

“The mere fact that a very large number of people believe such a thing and that the world would be a better place if it were true, is no reason for believing that it is true.”
― Leonard Woolf

“There is nothing to be said except about the sheer waste and futility of it all. It is the war all over again, when one is rung up to be told that Rupert was dead, or that one's brother was killed, and one knew that it was only to produce the kind of world we are living in now. Horrible.”
― Leonard Woolf

“The fact is, I find it extremely difficult to force myself to read old letters... Whenever one really knows the facts, one finds that what is accepted by contemporaries or posterity as the truth about them is so distorted or out of focus that it is not worth worrying about.”
― Leonard Woolf

“Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.”
― Leonard Woolf

“I see clearly that I have achieved practically nothing.”
― Leonard Woolf

“Nothing matters, and everything matters.”
― Leonard Woolf

“The exciting truth about friendship is that it is founded on choice; it's possibilities of growth and change are manifold. It fertilizes the soil of one's life, send up fresh shoots, encourages cross-pollination and the creation of new species.
Here and now I declare my infinite gratitude to my friends.”
― Frances Partridge, Love in Bloomsbury: Memories