Activity of mind, I think, is the only thing that keeps one’s life going, unless one has a larger emotional activity of some other kind. One’s mind that’s like a restless steamer paddle urging the ship along, tho’ the wind is non-existent and the sea is as still as glass. What a force a human being is! There are worse solitudes than drift ice, and yet this eternal throbbing heat and energy of one’s mind thaws a pathway through; and open sea and land shall come in time. Think though, what man is midst fields and woods. A solitary creature dependent on winds and tides, and yet somehow suppressing the might of a spark in his brain. What nonsense to write!

Virginia Woolf, The Early Journals, 1897 - 1909. 

As long as she lived that ecstasy was going to be hers. She would live for it, work for it, die for it; but she was going to have it, time after time, height after height. She could hear the crash of the orchestra again, and she rose on the brasses. She would have it, what the trumpets were singing! She would have it, have it – it!

(via operaswag)

But the books are the things that I enjoy — on the whole — most. I feel sometimes for hours together as though the physical stuff of my brain were expanding, larger and larger, throbbing quicker and quicker with new blood — and there is no more delicious sensation than this.

Virginia Woolf, The Early Journals 1897 - 1906.

Ambition, especially applied to women, has a negative connotation. It implies that you’re willing to step on other people, which is definitely not the truth. It’s perceived as unfeminine. We’re supposed to say, ‘Oh, it just happened to me. I’m so lucky.

Renée Fleming

She knew what he wanted, and gave it to him; not words, but a smile of warmth and delight — a smile that said, “I’m yours for the asking; I’m won.” It was not a smile that undervalued herself, because through its beauty it spoke for both of them, expressed all the potential joy that existed between them.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Emotional Bankruptcy

“The best is yet to be.”

- Robert Browning

“The most delightful surprise in life is to suddenly recognise your own worth.”

- Maxwell Maltz

“There it was before her - her life. Life; she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side and life was on another.”

—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse