#blooms

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues. ↗

— Phillips Brooks

#before #blooms #comes #full #hills

The Bloomsbury Group has been characterised as a liberal, pacifist, and at times libertine, intellectual enclave of Cambridge-based privilege. The Cambridge men of the group (Bell, Forster, Fry, Keynes, Strachey, Sydney-Turner) were members of the elite and secret society of Cambridge Apostles. Woolf’s aesthetic understanding, and broader philosophy, were in part shaped by, and at first primarily interpreted in terms of, (male) Bloomsbury’s dominant aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations, rooted in the work of G. E. Moore (a central influence on the Apostles), and culminating in Fry’s and Clive Bell’s differing brands of pioneering aesthetic formalism. ‘The main things which Moore instilled deep into our minds and characters,’ Leonard Woolf recalls, ‘were his peculiar passion for truth, for clarity and common sense, and a passionate belief in certain values.’ Increasing awareness of Woolf’s feminism, however, and of the influence on her work of other women artists, writers and thinkers has meant that these Moorean and male points of reference, though of importance, are no longer considered adequate in approaching Woolf’s work, and her intellectual development under the tutelage of women, together with her involvement with feminist thinkers and activists, is also now acknowledged. ↗

— Jane Goldman

#cambridge #literary-criticism #men

Down below the broad, roaring waves of the sea break against the deep foundation of the rock. But high above the mountain, the sea, and the peaks of rock the eternal ornamentation blooms silently from the dark depths of the universe. ↗

— Rudolf Otto

#against #below #blooms #break #broad

God in His infinite wisdom blessed humans with redundant tongues: one to outfit the mouth for speech. And a mother tongue to give it meaning... Though it wags out such inconceivable beauty, attached to the mother tongue lies one much maligned woman. ↗

— David B. Lentz

#bostoniad #david-b-lentz #mother-tongue #beauty

Love is like the wild rose-briar; Friendship like the holly-tree. The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, but which will bloom most constantly? ↗

— Emily Bronte

#blooms #constantly #dark #friendship #holly

I draw flowers every day and send them to my friends so they get fresh blooms every morning. ↗

— David Hockney

#day #draw #every #every day #flowers

When the sappy boughs Attire themselves with blooms, sweet rudiments Of future harvest. ↗

— John Philips

#blooms #boughs #future #harvest #rudiments

When the flower blooms, the bees come uninvited. ↗

— Ramakrishna

#blooms #come #flower #uninvited

The Rose is without an explanation; She blooms, because She blooms. ↗

— Angelus Silesius

#blooms #explanation #rose #she #without

The 'swapping' is interesting. This practice one had thought confined to certain earnest Americans in the smaller, more tedious cities, to those wives and husbands who had read sex manuals and radically wanted more of life even if it had to be, like pizza, brought in from around the corner--all of this was accomplished by Bloomsbury in the lightest, most spontaneous and good-natured manner. ↗

— Elizabeth Hardwick

#virginia-woof #writing #life