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Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. More than anything ... it calls for confidence in oneself ... And how can we generate this imponderable quality most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. -- Virginia Woolf
The voice of protest is the voice of another and an ancient civilization which seems to have bred in us the instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and understand. -- Virginia Woolf
If only he could be alone in his room working, he thought, among his books. That was where he felt at his ease. -- Virginia Woolf
I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September. -- Virginia Woolf
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. -- Virginia Woolf
She raised a little mountain for the ants to climb over. She reduced them to a frenzy of indecision by this interference in their cosmogony. Some ran this way, others that. -- Virginia Woolf
Why should a real chair be better than an imaginary elephant? -- Virginia Woolf
I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer? -- Virginia Woolf
No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes -- Virginia Woolf
Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. -- Virginia Woolf
The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. -- Virginia Woolf
But who, save the nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with hands to the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see things thus in skeleton outline, bare of flesh? -- Virginia Woolf
I should like to write four lines at a time, describing the same feeling, as a musician does; because it always seems to me that things are going on at so many different levels simultaneously. -- Virginia Woolf
To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination. -- Virginia Woolf
O how blessed it would be never to marry, or grow old; but to spend one's life innocently and indifferently among the trees and rivers which alone can keep one cool and childlike in the midst of the troubles of the world! -- Virginia Woolf
Here am I shedding one of my life-skins and all they will say is, 'Bernard is spending ten days in Rome'. -- Virginia Woolf
He- for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it- was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. -- Virginia Woolf
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface. -- Virginia Woolf
What I value is the naked contact of a mind. -- Virginia Woolf
And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? 'Confound it all.' he cried, 'why say Bedfellow when one's already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means and save it? -- Virginia Woolf
It was a great mistake to have come. He should have stayed at home and read his book, thought Peter Walsh; should have gone to a music hall; he should have stayed at home, for he knew no one. -- Virginia Woolf
It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man. -- Virginia Woolf
I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves. -- Virginia Woolf
She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not -- Virginia Woolf
So that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again ... -- Virginia Woolf
So, when there is a strife of tongues, at some meeting, the chairman, to obtain unity, suggests that every one shall speak in French. Perhaps it is bad French; French may not contain the words that express the speaker's thoughts; nevertheless speaking French imposes some order, some uniformity. -- Virginia Woolf
What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was. -- Virginia Woolf
Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any. -- Virginia Woolf
How could any Lord have made this world? ... there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for this world to commit ... No happiness lasted. -- Virginia Woolf
How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend.
How useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us. Yet how
painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed up,
become part of another. -- Virginia Woolf
Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred. -- Virginia Woolf
Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes? when, thought Clarissa, that's the miracle, that's the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of drawers to dressing-table. -- Virginia Woolf
What amulet is there against this disaster? What face can I summon to lay cool upon this heat? -- Virginia Woolf
But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness. -- Virginia Woolf
She liked getting hold of some book ... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one. -- Virginia Woolf
After all, she may have thought, do words say everything? Can words say anything? Do not words destroy the symbol that lies beyond the reach of words? -- Virginia Woolf
Emerged from the tentative ways, the obscurities and dazzle of youth, we
look straight in front of us, ready for what may come (the door opens,
the door keeps on opening). All is real; all is firm without shadow or
illusion. Beauty rides our brows. -- Virginia Woolf
The strange thing on looking back was the purity, the integrity of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling for a man. -- Virginia Woolf
Then he looked at a car. It was odd how soon one got used to cars without horses, he thought. They used to look ridiculous. -- Virginia Woolf
There it was, all round them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity. -- Virginia Woolf
Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small. The stalks of flowers are thick as oak trees. Leaves are high as the domes of vast cathedrals. We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver. -- Virginia Woolf
For her own self-satisfaction was it that she wished so instinctively to help, to give, that people might say of her, "O Mrs. Ramsay! dear Mrs. Ramsay . . . Mrs. Ramsay, of course!" and need her and send for her and admire her? Was it not secretly this that she wanted, -- Virginia Woolf
Perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one's own work. -- Virginia Woolf
When I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not. -- Virginia Woolf
Think of me, the uneducated child reading books in my room at 22 Hyde Park Gate
now advanced to this glory ... Yes; all that reading, I say, has borne this odd fruit. And I am pleased. -- Virginia Woolf
But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. -- Virginia Woolf
Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference. -- Virginia Woolf
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. -- Virginia Woolf
She lacks mystery; and the charm people have who withdraw, and don't care to coin their views. One figures her always in flight; so much determined to embrace everything that she fails. -- Virginia Woolf
But for ourselves, we resent teachers. Let a man get up and say, 'Behold, this is the truth,' and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say. -- Virginia Woolf
If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers? -- Virginia Woolf
I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it. -- Virginia Woolf
The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. -- Virginia Woolf
But when she looked at Prue tonight, she saw this was not now quite true of her. She was just beginning, just moving, just descending. -- Virginia Woolf
I luxuriate more in a whole day alone; a day of easy natural poses; slipping tranquilly off into the deep water of my own thoughts, navigating the underworld. -- Virginia Woolf
How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking? -- Virginia Woolf
How then did it work out, this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking? -- Virginia Woolf
And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband. -- Virginia Woolf
The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice. -- Virginia Woolf
It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories. It is far pleasanter than writing reviews of famous novels. -- Virginia Woolf
I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. -- Virginia Woolf
To be engaged to marry some one with whom you are not in love is an inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is only a traveler's story brought from the heart of deep forests and told so rarely that wise people doubt whether the story can be true. -- Virginia Woolf
Joy's life in the doing (..) I mean it's the writing, not the being read that excites me. -- Virginia Woolf
Facts must be manipulated; some must be brightened; others shaded; yet, in the process, they must never lose their integrity. -- Virginia Woolf
The entire gamut of the view's changes should have been known to her; its winter aspect, spring, summer and autumn; how storms came up from the sea; how the moors shuddered and brightened as the clouds went over. -- Virginia Woolf
Am I alone in my egotism when I say that never does the pale light of dawn filter through the blinds of 52 Tavistock Square but I open my eyes and exclaim, "Good God! Here I am again!" not always with pleasure, often with pain; sometimes in a spasm. -- Virginia Woolf
The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. -- Virginia Woolf
But that any other eyes should see the residue of her thirty-three years, the deposit of each day's living mixed with something more secret than she had ever spoken or shown in the course of all those days was an agony. At the same time it was immensely exciting. -- Virginia Woolf
To let the light of the world flood back-to say this has not happened!
But why turn one's head hither and thither? This is the truth. This is fact. -- Virginia Woolf
Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will. -- Virginia Woolf
When you are silent you are again beautiful. -- Virginia Woolf
Letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps - who knows? - we might talk by the way. -- Virginia Woolf
Why, after all, did she do these things? why seek pinnacles and stand drenched in fire? Might it consume her anyhow! Burn her to cinders! Better anything, better brandish one's torch and hurl it to earth than taper and dwindle away ... -- Virginia Woolf
Often she had seemed to herself to be moving among those vanished figures of old books and pictures, an invisible ghost among the living, better acquainted with them than with her own friends. she very nearly lost consciousness that she was a separate being, with a future of her own. -- Virginia Woolf
You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures. -- Virginia Woolf
For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn ... -- Virginia Woolf
Happily, at forty-six I still feel as experimental and on the verge of getting at the truth as ever. -- Virginia Woolf
I catch your eye. I, who had been thinking myself so vast, a temple, a church, a whole universe, confined and capable of being everywhere on the verge of things and here too, am now nothing but what you see. -- Virginia Woolf
Children never forget injustice. They forgive heaps of things grown-up people mind; but that sin is the unpardonable sin. -- Virginia Woolf
Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees, ... one's happiness, one's reality? -- Virginia Woolf
Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered -- Virginia Woolf
Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea. -- Virginia Woolf
[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. -- Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. -- Virginia Woolf
Shakespeare's state of mind -- Virginia Woolf
It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred ... -- Virginia Woolf
Tragedies come in the hungry hours. -- Virginia Woolf
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. -- Virginia Woolf
Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours. -- Virginia Woolf
I exist only in the soles of my feet and in the tired muscles of my thighs. We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot remember. -- Virginia Woolf
Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does. -- Virginia Woolf
A writer's letters should be as literary as his printed works. -- Virginia Woolf
Septimus has been working too hard - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought. -- Virginia Woolf
Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are! -- Virginia Woolf
To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality. -- Virginia Woolf
He is precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the rest of his life. -- Virginia Woolf
Love had a thousand shapes. -- Virginia Woolf
How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories? -- Virginia Woolf
First she starved herself of love, which meant also life; then of poetry in deference to what she thought her religion demanded. -- Virginia Woolf
For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not as simple as our friends would have us to meet our needs. Yet love is simple. -- Virginia Woolf
There was something solemn in it- but love and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul. -- Virginia Woolf
Her eyes seemed to question, to commiserate, to be, for a second, love itself. -- Virginia Woolf
Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence. -- Virginia Woolf
I like it when people actually come, but I love it when they go. -- Virginia Woolf
What could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands. -- Virginia Woolf
Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you. -- Virginia Woolf
I've cared for heaps of people, but not to marry them' she said. 'I suppose I'm too fastidious. all my life I've wanted somebody I could look up to, somebody great and big and splendid. Most men are so small.'
'What d;you mean by splendid?' Hewet asked. 'People are-nothing more. -- Virginia Woolf
Communication is truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty; to go down boldly and bring to light those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends to let them know it. -- Virginia Woolf
She felt drawing further from her and further from her an Archduke,
(she did not mind that)
a fortune,
(she did not mind that)
the safety and circumstance of married life,
(she did not mind that)
but life she heard going from her, and a lover. -- Virginia Woolf
That people should love like this, that Mr. Bankes should feel this for Mrs. Ramsay (she glanced at him musing) was helpful, was exalting. -- Virginia Woolf
I would never re-write you. You are by far my most complete and greatest novel. -- Virginia Woolf
Peace was the third emotion. Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life. -- Virginia Woolf
You're going to go on dreaming and imagining and making up stories about me as you walk along the street, and pretending that we're riding in a forest, or landing on an island - '
'No. I shall think of you ordering dinner, paying bills, doing the accounts, showing old ladies the relics - -- Virginia Woolf
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. -- Virginia Woolf
What does the brain matter compared with the heart? -- Virginia Woolf
I love and I hate. I desire one thing only. -- Virginia Woolf
This was a favourite dress, one of Sally Parker's, the last almost she ever made, alas, for Sally had now retired, living at Ealing, and if ever I have a moment, thought Clarissa (but never would she have a moment any more), I shall go and see her at Ealing. -- Virginia Woolf
To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is ... at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away ... -- Virginia Woolf
On their faces an expression like the letters of a legend, written around the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England ... -- Virginia Woolf
We seem to be riding on the top of the highest mast of the tallest ship; and yet at the same time we know that nothing of this sort matters; love is not proved thus, nor great achievements completed thus; so that we sport with the moment and preen our feathers in it lightly. -- Virginia Woolf
Through other people's bodies she felt neither love nor hate distinctly. Most consciously she felt - she had drunk sweet wine at luncheon - a desire for water. "A beaker of cold water, a beaker of cold water," she repeated, and saw water surrounded by walls of shining glass. -- Virginia Woolf
(But he could not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words.) -- Virginia Woolf
Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched - love for instance - we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next. -- Virginia Woolf
Faces and faces, served out like soup-plates by scullions; coarse, greedy, casual; looking in at shopwindows with pendent parcels; ogling, brushing, destroying everything, leaving even our love impure, touched now by their dirty fingers. -- Virginia Woolf
There can be no doubt, I thought, pushing aside the newspaper, that our mean lives, unsightly as they are, put on splendour and have meaning only under the eyes of love -- Virginia Woolf
Anyhow, she thought, they are aware of each other; they live in each other; what else is love, she asked, listening to their laughter. -- Virginia Woolf
I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you. -- Virginia Woolf
Deffand fell in love with him, and thought that at her age she could -- Virginia Woolf
In all the books love is one of the great facts that mould human life. But it is a catastrophe: it happens suddenly and overwhelmingly, and there is little to be said about it. -- Virginia Woolf
Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time's clock with one blow. Come closer. -- Virginia Woolf
Love ought to stop on both sides, don't you think, simultaneously?' He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake the sleepers. 'But it won't - that's the devil,' he added in the same undertone. -- Virginia Woolf
If this is love, there is something highly ridiculous about it. -- Virginia Woolf
Life and a lover -- Virginia Woolf
Oh, I am in love with life! -- Virginia Woolf
What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? -- Virginia Woolf
She put on her lace collar. She put on her new hat and he never noticed; and he was happy without her. -- Virginia Woolf
For love ... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together -- Virginia Woolf
He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together. -- Virginia Woolf
That silence is more profound after noise still wants the confirmation of science. But that loneliness is more apparent directly after one has been made love to, many women would take their oath. -- Virginia Woolf
And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured. -- Virginia Woolf
Clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude. -- Virginia Woolf
But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people. -- Virginia Woolf
They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love -- Virginia Woolf
Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it. -- Virginia Woolf
I love tremendous and sonorous words. -- Virginia Woolf
But with you I am deeply passionately, unrequitedly in love. -- Virginia Woolf
To love makes one solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody, not even Septimus now ... -- Virginia Woolf
One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in it. -- Virginia Woolf
Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One's Mind about Another Person. -- Virginia Woolf
It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain. -- Virginia Woolf
But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love. -- Virginia Woolf
It was protective, on her side; sprang from a sense of being in league together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them (they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe), which led to this chivalry, this protective feeling which was much more on her side than Sally's. -- Virginia Woolf
To love makes one solitary. -- Virginia Woolf
Love had meant nothing to him but sawdust and cinders. -- Virginia Woolf
I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement. -- Virginia Woolf
Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotion made the ply of human life. -- Virginia Woolf
Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with these silences. -- Virginia Woolf
One must love everything. -- Virginia Woolf
For such gestures one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime -- Virginia Woolf
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money. -- Virginia Woolf
Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago. -- Virginia Woolf
I am very tolerant. I am not a moralist. I have too great a sense of the shortness of life and its temptations to rule red lines. Yet I am not so indiscriminate as you think, judging me - as you judge me - from my fluency. -- Virginia Woolf
My heart is manoeuvring in rings of trembling darkness and unreasonable echoes of over-thoughtfulness. -- Virginia Woolf
Life would split apart without letters. -- Virginia Woolf
Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence. -- Virginia Woolf
Speech is an old torn net, through which the fish escape as one casts it over them. -- Virginia Woolf
To know whom to write for is to know how to write. -- Virginia Woolf
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency. -- Virginia Woolf
I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore. -- Virginia Woolf
But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can. -- Virginia Woolf
Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics. -- Virginia Woolf
It was the stupidity of virility that impressed me
& how, having made those convenient railway lines of convention, the lusts speed along them unquestioning. -- Virginia Woolf
I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and butter -- Virginia Woolf
As for 'drawing you out,' please believe I don't do such things deliberately, with an object
It's only that I am, as a rule, far more interested in people than they are in me
But it makes me a nuisance, I know: only an innocent nuisance. -- Virginia Woolf
There is a coherence in things, a stability; something ... is immune from change and shines out ... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby. -- Virginia Woolf
The root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty. -- Virginia Woolf
If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs? -- Virginia Woolf
There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea. -- Virginia Woolf
Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder. -- Virginia Woolf
Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art? -- Virginia Woolf
It is the fate of the innocent to suffer. -- Virginia Woolf
The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight. -- Virginia Woolf
They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.] -- Virginia Woolf
I have lost friends, some by death - Percival - others through sheer inability to cross the street. -- Virginia Woolf
It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds -- Virginia Woolf
There's just this ... .an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined. -- Virginia Woolf
With a stranger he felt a renewal of hope because they could not say that he had not done what he had promised, and yielding to his charm would give him a fresh start - -- Virginia Woolf
Pure honesty is a doubtful quality; it means often lack of imagination. -- Virginia Woolf
I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded. -- Virginia Woolf
But he could not tell her he loved her. He held her hand. Happiness is this, he thought. -- Virginia Woolf
As a woman, I have no country -- Virginia Woolf
I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony. -- Virginia Woolf
If people are highly successful in their profession they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion. -- Virginia Woolf
So the being grows rings; identity becomes robust. What was fiery and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of life from every quarter is now methodical and orderly and flung with a purpose
so it seems. -- Virginia Woolf
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory. -- Virginia Woolf
What is nobler," she mused, turning over the photographs, "than to be a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty? -- Virginia Woolf
I fear I shall be a clinger to the outsides of words all my life. -- Virginia Woolf
I have been stained by you and corrupted. You smelt so unpleasant too, lining up outside doors to buy tickets. -- Virginia Woolf
Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections. -- Virginia Woolf
They were both in the prime of youth, or even in that season which precedes the prime of youth, the season before the smooth pink folds of the flower have burst their gummy case, when the wings of the butterfly, though fully grown, are motionless in the sun. -- Virginia Woolf
It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality. -- Virginia Woolf
you are an immensely ancient, complex, and continuous character, for which reason please treat yourself with respect and -- Virginia Woolf
I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me, they are all violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces. -- Virginia Woolf
She sighed, she snored, not that she was asleep, only drowsy and heavy, drowsy and heavy, like a field of clover in the sunshine this hot July day, with the bees going round and about and the yellow butterflies. -- Virginia Woolf
The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I. -- Virginia Woolf
Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. -- Virginia Woolf
I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words. -- Virginia Woolf
Does Nature supplement what man advanced? Or does she complete what he began? -- Virginia Woolf
It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. -- Virginia Woolf
If newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art. -- Virginia Woolf
He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence. -- Virginia Woolf
I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement ... -- Virginia Woolf
For in marriage a little licence,a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him. -- Virginia Woolf
The poet is always our contemporary. -- Virginia Woolf
Scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman's rifle; the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you, not by us. Obviously there is for you some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting which we have never felt or enjoyed. -- Virginia Woolf
These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important. -- Virginia Woolf
but what his family most resented, he reflected, was his wish for privacy. To dine alone, or to sit alone after dinner, was flat rebellion, to be fought with every weapon of underhand stealth or of open appeal. -- Virginia Woolf
I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything. -- Virginia Woolf
And I will now rock the brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the waves. Some will founder. Some will dash themselves against the cliffs. One sails alone. That is my ship. It sails into icy caverns where the sea-bear barks and stalactites swing green chains. -- Virginia Woolf
You can't think how I depend on you, and when you're not there the colour goes out of my life. -- Virginia Woolf
Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand. -- Virginia Woolf
Women made civilisation impossible with all their "charm " all their silliness. -- Virginia Woolf
Long years - " he sighs. "Again you found me." "Here," she murmurs. -- Virginia Woolf
How was one to lasso her mind, and tether it to this minute, unimportant spot? -- Virginia Woolf
We ain't popular
we sit in corners and look like mutes who are longing for a funeral. -- Virginia Woolf
Women are so suspicious of any interest that has not some obvious motive behind it, so terribly accustomed to concealment and suppression, that they are off at the flicker of an eye turned observingly in their direction. -- Virginia Woolf
Night had come - night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day. -- Virginia Woolf
That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly. -- Virginia Woolf
To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy. -- Virginia Woolf
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth. -- Virginia Woolf
And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking. -- Virginia Woolf
I have felt that odd whirr of wings in the head. -- Virginia Woolf
Because it is a thousand pities to never say what one feels -- Virginia Woolf
She walked with Bertram; she walked rather like a stag, with a little give of the ankles, fanning herself, majestic, silent, with all her senses roused, her ears pricked, snuffing the air, as if she had been some wild, but perfectly controlled creature taking its pleasure by night. -- Virginia Woolf
I walk making up phrases; sit, contriving scenes; am in short in the thick of the greatest rapture known to me. -- Virginia Woolf
To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not. -- Virginia Woolf
Every woman, even the most respectable, had roses blooming under glass; lips cut with a knife; curls of Indian ink; there was design, art, everywhere; a change of some sort had undoubtedly taken place. -- Virginia Woolf
I always wish that you could marry everybody who wants to marry you. -- Virginia Woolf
Every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses! -- Virginia Woolf
He would look over the edge of the sofa down into the sea. -- Virginia Woolf
Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens. -- Virginia Woolf
The streamers of my consciousness waver out and are perpetually torn and distressed by their disorder. -- Virginia Woolf
When two people have been married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other's bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness. -- Virginia Woolf
She felt as if things were moving past her as she lay stretched on the bed under the single sheet. But it's not landscape any longer, she thought; it's people's lives, their changing lives. -- Virginia Woolf
I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy - to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits. -- Virginia Woolf
Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious. -- Virginia Woolf
I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. -- Virginia Woolf
The summer is put away folded up in the drawer with other summers. -- Virginia Woolf
Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy. -- Virginia Woolf
Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise. -- Virginia Woolf
Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody. -- Virginia Woolf
People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more then they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime. -- Virginia Woolf
I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity. -- Virginia Woolf
For there is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light. -- Virginia Woolf
June was white. I see the fields white with daisies, and white with dresses; and tennis courts marked with white. Then there was wind and violent thunder. There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, "Consume me". That was at midsummer. -- Virginia Woolf
I'm rooted but I flow -- Virginia Woolf
It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the dark paths of the mind and enter the past, to visit books, to brush aside their branches and break off some fruit. -- Virginia Woolf
Sometimes, one trembling star comes in the clear sky and makes me think the world beautiful and we maggots deforming even the trees with our lusts. -- Virginia Woolf
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure -- Virginia Woolf
To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again! -- Virginia Woolf
You would get longer livelier and more frequent letters from me, if it weren't for the Christian religion. How that bell tolling at the end of the garden, dum dum, dum dum, annoys me! Why is Christianity so insistent and so sad? -- Virginia Woolf
But none speaks with a single voice. None with a voice free from the old vibrations. Always I hear corrupt murmurs; the chink of gold and metal. Mad music ... -- Virginia Woolf
And even a tea party means apprehension, breakage -- Virginia Woolf
The body after long illness is languid, passive, receptive of sweetness, but too weak to contain it. -- Virginia Woolf
I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. I cannot be tossed about, or float gently, or mix with other people. -- Virginia Woolf
[2] or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of -- Virginia Woolf
One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see. -- Virginia Woolf
If you stand a lantern under a tree every insect in the forest creeps up to it - a curious assembly, since though they scramble and swing and knock their heads against the glass, they seem to have no purpose - something senseless inspires them. -- Virginia Woolf
I have had my vision. -- Virginia Woolf
And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one. -- Virginia Woolf
Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences. -- Virginia Woolf
Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it. -- Virginia Woolf
The proper stuff of fiction' does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss. -- Virginia Woolf
He remembered that, after digging for a little, the water oozes round your finger-tips; the hole then becomes a moat; a well; a spring; a secret channel to the sea. -- Virginia Woolf
What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included. -- Virginia Woolf
last the play was ended. All had grown dark. The tears streamed down his face. Looking up into the sky there was nothing but blackness there too. Ruin and death, he thought, cover all. The life of man ends in the grave. Worms devour us. -- Virginia Woolf
I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say "This is it"? My depression is a harassed feeling. I'm looking: but that's not it - that's not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it? -- Virginia Woolf
I note however that this diary writing does not count as writing, since I have just re-read my year's diary and am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles. -- Virginia Woolf
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
Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for. -- Virginia Woolf
Roses," she thought sardonically, "All trash, m'dear. -- Virginia Woolf
This susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing, no doubt. Still at his age he had, like a boy or a girl even, these alternations of mood; good days, bad days, for no reason whatever, happiness from a pretty face, downright misery at the sight of a frump. -- Virginia Woolf
It was only by scorning all she met that she kept herself from tears, and the friction of people brushing past her was evidently painful. -- Virginia Woolf
To write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale. -- Virginia Woolf
Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. -- Virginia Woolf
Either I shall find it, or I shall not find it. I examine my note-case. I look in all my pockets. These are the things that forever interrupt the process upon which I am eternally engaged of finding some perfect phrase that fits this moment exactly. -- Virginia Woolf
I've seen more trouble come from long engagements than from any other forms of human folly. -- Virginia Woolf
Though the wind is rough and blowing in their faces, those girls there, striding hand in hand, shouting out a song, seem to feel neither cold nor shame. They are hatless. They triumph. -- Virginia Woolf
All night men and women seethed up and down the well-known beats. -- Virginia Woolf
But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world
a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors. -- Virginia Woolf
All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. -- Virginia Woolf
The liftman in the tube is an eternal necessity ... -- Virginia Woolf
Buy for me from the King's own kennels, the finest elk hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring them back without delay. For," he murmured, scarcely above his breath as he turned to his books, "I have done with men. -- Virginia Woolf
When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better
her husband; money; his books. But for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties -- Virginia Woolf
Waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of ... -- Virginia Woolf
They say that one must beat one's wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines -- Virginia Woolf
Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waters, he went over me, his devastating presence - dragging me open, laying bare the pebbles on the shore of my soul. -- Virginia Woolf
I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it. -- Virginia Woolf
For I hear music, they were saying. Music wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken. Look and listen. -- Virginia Woolf
That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library. -- Virginia Woolf
Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded. -- Virginia Woolf
Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels, he thought... -- Virginia Woolf
I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest. -- Virginia Woolf
The mind is certainly a very mysterious organ, I reflected, drawing my head in from the window, about which nothing whatever is known, though we depend upon it so completely. -- Virginia Woolf
Mr John Langdon Davies warns women 'that when children cease to be altogether desirable, women cease to be altogether necessary'. -- Virginia Woolf
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order -- Virginia Woolf
Have I never understood you, Katherine? Have I been very selfish?' 'Yes ... You've asked her for sympathy, and she's not sympathetic; you've wanted her to be practical, and she's not practical. -- Virginia Woolf
And if it be true that it is one of the tokens of the fully developed mind that it does not think specially or separately of sex, how much harder it is to attain that condition now than ever before ... No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own ... -- Virginia Woolf
For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately. -- Virginia Woolf
The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. -- Virginia Woolf
Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. -- Virginia Woolf
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose. -- Virginia Woolf
I belong to quick, futile moments of intense feeling. Yes, I belong to moments. Not to people. -- Virginia Woolf
Leonard Woolf: If I didn't know you better I'd call this ingratitude.
Virginia Woolf: I am ungrateful? You call ME ungrateful? My life has been stolen from me. I'm living in a town I have no wish to live in... I'm living a life I have no wish to live... How did this happen? -- Virginia Woolf
They are very large in effect, these painters; very little self-conscious; they have smooth broad spaces in their minds where I am all prickles & promontories. -- Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf had to ask herself How can one weigh and shape dialogue till each sentence tears the shingles in the bottom of the reader's soul? -- Virginia Woolf
Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end. -- Virginia Woolf
Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that -- Virginia Woolf
I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one's own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful. -- Virginia Woolf
In a world which contains the present moment, why discriminate? Nothing should be named lest by so doing we change it. -- Virginia Woolf
The words issuing from her lips like crumbs of dry biscuit. -- Virginia Woolf
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
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. -- Virginia Woolf
It's books," sighed Helen, lifting an armful of sad volumes from the floor to the shelf. "Greek from morning to night. If ever Miss Rachel marries, Chailey, pray that she may marry a man who doesn't know his ABC. -- Virginia Woolf
It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance ... -- Virginia Woolf
I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams. -- Virginia Woolf
Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she did not think of tears at first) which, without disturbing the firmness of her lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks. She had perfect control of herself-Oh, yes!-in every other way. -- Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Hilbery would have been perfectly well able to sustain herself if the world had been what the world is not. She was beautifully adapted for life in another planet. -- Virginia Woolf
And is there any reason, we ask as we shut the book, why the perspective that a plain earthenware pot exacts should not satisfy us as completely, once we grasp it, as man himself in all his sublimity standing against a background of broken mountains and tumbling oceans with stars flaming in the sky? -- Virginia Woolf
There was silence. Then as if to refresh the power of destruction, the wind rose and the waves rose and through the house there lifted itself a sullen wave of doom which curled and crashed and the whole earth seemed ruining and washing away in water. -- Virginia Woolf
It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on. -- Virginia Woolf
There never will be a book, because some one else has written it for him," said Mr. Pepper with considerable acidity. "That's what comes of putting things off, and collecting fossils, and sticking Norman arches on one's pigsties. -- Virginia Woolf
Her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it -- Virginia Woolf
By the bold and running use of metaphor he will amplify and give us, not the thing itself, but the reverberation and reflection which, taken into his mind, the thing has made; close enough to the original to illustrate it, remote enough to heighten, enlarge, and make splendid. -- Virginia Woolf
He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash and hush of the sea. -- Virginia Woolf
She felt ... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach. -- Virginia Woolf
Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit. -- Virginia Woolf
Let me pull myself out of these waters. But they heap themselves on me; they sweep me between their great shoulders; I am turned; I am tumbled; I am stretched, among these long lights, these long waves, these endless paths, with people pursuing, pursuing. -- Virginia Woolf
Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost. -- Virginia Woolf
He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. -- Virginia Woolf
For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say 'good to eat' when they mean 'beautiful' and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves. -- Virginia Woolf
. . . to walk alone in London is the greatest rest. -- Virginia Woolf
I am obsessed at nights with the idea of my own worthlessness, and if it were only to turn a light on to save my life I think I would not do it. -- Virginia Woolf
The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of-man. -- Virginia Woolf
For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. -- Virginia Woolf
Always, Mrs Ramsay felt, one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight. -- Virginia Woolf
About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone. -- Virginia Woolf
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
I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours. -- Virginia Woolf
We [women] have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that ... takes time. -- Virginia Woolf
And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power, as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky. -- Virginia Woolf
Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death. -- Virginia Woolf
she had insisted upon showing him her new showerbath. "You press that knob," she had said, "and look - " Innumerable needles of water shot down. He laughed aloud. They had sat on the edge of the bath together. But -- Virginia Woolf
Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness ... -- Virginia Woolf
The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with skepticism and solitude. -- Virginia Woolf
Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. -- Virginia Woolf
The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
[on James Joyce's Ulysses] -- Virginia Woolf
Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are. -- Virginia Woolf
We have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal in the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print. -- Virginia Woolf
The sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour struck out between them with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that. -- Virginia Woolf
I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction. -- Virginia Woolf
Now, again, he paused, and into the breach thus made, leapt Ambition, the harridan, and Poetry, the witch, and Desire of Fame, the strumpet; all joined hands and made of his heart their dancing ground. -- Virginia Woolf
Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price. -- Virginia Woolf
The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks - so it sounded. -- Virginia Woolf
The green garden, moonlit pool, lemons, lovers, and fish are all dissolved in the opal sky, across which, as the horns are joined by trumpets and supported by clarions there rise white arches firmly planted on marble pillars ... -- Virginia Woolf
If you drink the good wine of the noble countess, you have to entertain her less desirable friends. -- Virginia Woolf
Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one! -- Virginia Woolf
She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through. -- Virginia Woolf
Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?
startling, unexpected, unknown? -- Virginia Woolf
Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And
I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often
not. Life is a dream surely. -- Virginia Woolf
Chastity ... has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest. -- Virginia Woolf
As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking. -- Virginia Woolf
Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation. -- Virginia Woolf
I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases. -- Virginia Woolf
My mind is so impatient, so quick, in some ways so desperate. -- Virginia Woolf
Like" and "like" and "like"
but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? -- Virginia Woolf
The profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait - whether to fish with worms or not ... -- Virginia Woolf
When suddenly, as if a shelf were shot forth and she stood on it, she said how she was his wife, married years ago in Milan, his wife, and would never, never tell that he was mad -- Virginia Woolf
In case you ever foolishly forget: I am never not thinking of you. -- Virginia Woolf
It is the duty of the writer to describe. -- Virginia Woolf
For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. -- Virginia Woolf
I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific. -- Virginia Woolf
You are you. That is what consoles me for the lack of many things. -- Virginia Woolf
And it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. -- Virginia Woolf
I am not sinuous or suave; I sit among you abrading your softness with my hardness, quenching the silver-grey flickering moth-wing quiver of words with the green spurt of my clear eyes. -- Virginia Woolf
Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing. -- Virginia Woolf
Could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world. It -- Virginia Woolf
No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. -- Virginia Woolf
We are not as simple as our friends would have us to meet their ends. -- Virginia Woolf
Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now. -- Virginia Woolf
Books should stand on their own feet ... If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady. -- Virginia Woolf
The spring without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid out on fields wide-eyed and watchful and entirely careless of what was done or thought by the beholders. -- Virginia Woolf
Wine has a drastic, an astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I drink. Ascent of flowers, radiance and heat, are distilled here to a fiery, yellow liquid. Just behind my shoulder-blades some dry thing, wide-eyed, gently closes, gradually lulls itself to sleep. This is rapture. This is relief. -- Virginia Woolf
We think back through our mothers and grandmothers, if we are women. -- Virginia Woolf
And since beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful, and he is static, his life stagnates in a china sea. -- Virginia Woolf
But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful ... -- Virginia Woolf
Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become. -- Virginia Woolf
Human relations, at least between the sexes, were carried on as relations between countries are now - with ambassadors, and treaties. The parties concerned met on the great occasion of the proposal. If this were refused, a state of war was declared. -- Virginia Woolf
Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and white? -- Virginia Woolf
There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is ripling,
all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph. -- Virginia Woolf
I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me. -- Virginia Woolf
The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl. -- Virginia Woolf
I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall. -- Virginia Woolf
In reading we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river -- Virginia Woolf
No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion. -- Virginia Woolf
Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness. -- Virginia Woolf
For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn? -- Virginia Woolf
Things were not so simple after all. She could not understand even her own feelings. She saw the most cherished of her convictions put into practice - and her eyes filled with tears. She had won fame and independence and the right to live her own life - and she wanted something different. -- Virginia Woolf
For the truth is ... that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs. Their packs scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness. They desert the fallen. -- Virginia Woolf
Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. -- Virginia Woolf
We stumble up - we stumble on. -- Virginia Woolf
A daddy-long-legs shot from corner to corner and hit the lamp globe. The wind blew straight dashes of rain across the window, which flashed silver as they passed through the light. A single leaf tapped hurriedly, persistently, upon the glass. There was a hurricane out at sea. -- Virginia Woolf
She had done the usual trick-been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere. -- Virginia Woolf
Why do people who live in the country always give themselves such airs? -- Virginia Woolf
In normal circumstances a lovely young woman alone would have thought of nothing else; the whole edifice of female government is based on that foundation stone; chastity is their jewel, their centrepiece, which they run mad to protect, and die when ravished of. -- Virginia Woolf
There they were," she went on, "the stars. And he asked himself, my great-grandfather - that boy: 'What are they? Why are they? And who am I?' as one does, sitting alone, with no one to talk to, looking at the stars. -- Virginia Woolf
But she could not reduce her vision to words, since it was no single shape coloured upon the dark, but rather a general excitement, an atmosphere, which, when she tried to visualize it, took form as a wind scouring the flanks of the northern hills and flashing light upon cornfields and pools. -- Virginia Woolf
I need solitude. I need space. I need air. I need the empty fields round me; and my legs pounding along roads; and sleep; and animal existence. -- Virginia Woolf
The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme
thinking too much. -- Virginia Woolf
For there she was. -- Virginia Woolf
I'll be blasted', he said, 'if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I'll write, from this day forward, to please myself -- Virginia Woolf
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out. -- Virginia Woolf
Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough. -- Virginia Woolf
When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook - a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases. -- Virginia Woolf
The fact about contemporaries is that they're doing the same thing on another railway line: one resents their distracting one, flashing past, the wrong way- something like that: from timidity, partly, one keeps one's eyes on one's own road. -- Virginia Woolf
She was the most beautiful person he had ever seen. With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets. -- Virginia Woolf
Her pleasant brown eyes resembled Ralph's, save in expression, for whereas he seemed to look straightly and keenly at one object, she appeared to be in the habit of considering everything from many different points of view. -- Virginia Woolf
Dance music ... stirs some barbaric instinct - lulled asleep in our sober lives - you forget centuries of civilization in a second, & yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room. -- Virginia Woolf
To enjoy freedom ... we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose. -- Virginia Woolf
I currently do nothing, nothing except get almost purposefully and absolutely consciously bored with myself. -- Virginia Woolf
And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover. -- Virginia Woolf
One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she reflected. Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought. -- Virginia Woolf
They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort. -- Virginia Woolf
Every single thing [ ... ] he found thus cumbered with other matter like the lump of grass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned women. -- Virginia Woolf
I am attended by doctors, everywhere I am attended by doctors who inform me of my own interests. -- Virginia Woolf
A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living. -- Virginia Woolf
In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. -- Virginia Woolf
Distant views seemed to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest. -- Virginia Woolf
To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province. -- Virginia Woolf
No, I'm not clever. I've always cared more for people than for ideas. -- Virginia Woolf
To stand in a great bookshop crammed with books so new that their pages almost stick together, and the gilt on their backs is still fresh, has an excitement no less delightful than the old excitement of the second-hand bookstall. -- Virginia Woolf
Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent. -- Virginia Woolf
I was thinking between 3 and 4 this morning, of my 55 years. I lay awake so calm, so content, as if I'd stepped off the whirling world into a deep blue quiet space and there open eyed existed, beyond harm; armed against all that can happen. -- Virginia Woolf
We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art. -- Virginia Woolf
He felt the need for something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced amorous gales every evening about this time. -- Virginia Woolf
By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream -- Virginia Woolf
It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for. -- Virginia Woolf
Extremes of feeling are allied to madness; -- Virginia Woolf
How immense must be the force of life which turns a baby , who can just distinguish a great blot of blue and purple on a black background, into the child who thirteen years later can feel all that I felt on May 5th 1895 - now almost exactly to a day, forty-four years ago - when my mother died. -- Virginia Woolf
But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather. -- Virginia Woolf
But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. -- Virginia Woolf
With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes
one of the tragedies of married life. -- Virginia Woolf
Now, the truth is that when one has been in a state of mind (as nurses call it) - and the tears still stood in Orlando's eyes - the thing one is looking at becomes, not itself, but another thing, which is bigger and much more important and yet remains the same thing. -- Virginia Woolf
In the flailing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances -- Virginia Woolf
Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart. -- Virginia Woolf
And then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart. -- Virginia Woolf
Despairing of human relationships (people were so difficult), she often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her. -- Virginia Woolf
Whatever sentence I extract whole and entire from this cauldron is only a string of six little fish that let themselves be caught while a million others leap and sizzle, making the cauldron bubble like boiling silver, and slip through my fingers. -- Virginia Woolf
She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose. -- Virginia Woolf
There are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, and if one can neithre feel nor think, where's one? -- Virginia Woolf
Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone. -- Virginia Woolf
Your image has receded till it is like the thinnest shadow of the old moon... a thin silver edge appeared, and now you hang like a sickle over my life. -- Virginia Woolf
Possible then the professor inited a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of omen, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his superiority. -- Virginia Woolf
Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play. -- Virginia Woolf
woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and -- Virginia Woolf
University lectures are an obsolete practice inherited from the Middle Ages when books were scarce. Students should read, not listen. To swallow instruction from a lectern is like sipping through a straw. Lectures pander to the vanity of the lecturer and stimulate conflict between academics. -- Virginia Woolf
I should never be able to fulfill what is,I understand, the first duty of a lecturer-to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever. -- Virginia Woolf
There are perhaps more of the qualities that matter among the ignorant then among the learned. But again, what a vile thing the rabble is! -- Virginia Woolf
It was a desire, an echo, a sound; she could drape it in color, see it in form, hear it in music, but not in words; no, never in words. She sighed, teased by desires so incoherent, so incommunicable. -- Virginia Woolf
Even Orlando (who had no conceit of her person) knew it, for she smiled the involuntary smile which women smile when their own beauty, which seems not their own, forms like a drop falling or a fountain rising and confronts them all of a sudden in the glass. -- Virginia Woolf
Life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness, one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure. -- Virginia Woolf
Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life. -- Virginia Woolf
O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery. -- Virginia Woolf
It was a very very nice letter you wrote by the light of the stars at midnight. Always write then, for your heart requires moonlight to deliquesce it. And mine is fried in gaslight, as it is only nine o'clock and I must go to bed at eleven. -- Virginia Woolf
Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously. -- Virginia Woolf
...a leering, sneering obscene little harpy... -- Virginia Woolf
He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams. -- Virginia Woolf
Why must they grow up and lose it all? -- Virginia Woolf
I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices -- Virginia Woolf
Never would she come first with anyone. -- Virginia Woolf
I begin to be impatient of solitude - to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me. -- Virginia Woolf
As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better. -- Virginia Woolf
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned
in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages? -- Virginia Woolf
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
Here, she felt, putting the spoon down, was the still space that lies about the heart of things, where one could move or rest ... -- Virginia Woolf
All the months are crude experiments out of which the perfect September is made. -- Virginia Woolf
O friendship, how piercing are your darts - there, there, again there. -- Virginia Woolf
Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently. -- Virginia Woolf
Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact. Therefore -- Virginia Woolf
There are some books that LIVE," she mused. "They are young with us, and they grow old with us. -- Virginia Woolf
But the Daily Mail isn't to be trusted," Jacob said to himself, looking about for something else to read. -- Virginia Woolf
But why should I ask all the dull women in London to my parties? said Clarissa. And if Mrs. Marsham gave a party, did she invite her guests? -- Virginia Woolf
The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping. -- Virginia Woolf
Light and evanescent but held together by bolts of iron -- Virginia Woolf
She held in her hands for one brief moment the globe which we spend our lives in trying to shape, round, whole, and entire from the confusion of chaos. -- Virginia Woolf
His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely knew whether they held dreams or realities ... and in five minutes she had filled the shell of the old dream with the flesh of life ... -- Virginia Woolf
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea. -- Virginia Woolf
A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her. -- Virginia Woolf
Thinking was going on then as now; and thinking after all, is the flesh and blood of life; action seemed to her all out of proportion, as though people came and waved flags in your face. -- Virginia Woolf
The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process. -- Virginia Woolf
The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think. -- Virginia Woolf
The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom. -- Virginia Woolf
He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life. -- Virginia Woolf
Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe. -- Virginia Woolf
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he. -- Virginia Woolf
So we went to the Zoo; & I daresay I could write something interesting about that
a pale stone desert given over to charwomen & decorators: a few bears, a mandrill, & a fox or two
all in the desolation of depression. -- Virginia Woolf
He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a sparkle of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type. -- Virginia Woolf
Use words that soak up life. -- Virginia Woolf
The sweetness of this content overflowing runs down the walls of my mind, and liberates understanding. -- Virginia Woolf
it? - "I prefer men to cauliflowers" - was -- Virginia Woolf
Yet he too obsessed me for years. Until I wrote it out, I would find my lips moving; I would be arguing with him; raging against him; saying to myself all that I never said to him. How deep they drove themselves into me, the things it was impossible to say aloud. -- Virginia Woolf
Like all very handsome men who die tragically, he left not so much a character behind him as a legend. Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face ... -- Virginia Woolf
We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly. -- Virginia Woolf
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. -- Virginia Woolf
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry. -- Virginia Woolf
The clouds, warm now, sun-spotted, sweep over the hills, leaving gold in the water, and gold on the necks of the swans. -- Virginia Woolf
The next few months passed away, as many years can pass away, without definite events, and yet, if suddenly disturbed, it would be seen that such months or years had a character unlike others. -- Virginia Woolf
He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink. -- Virginia Woolf
It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. -- Virginia Woolf
There was all the difference in the world between this planning airily away from the canvas and actually taking her brush and making the first mark. -- Virginia Woolf
that England is under the rule of a patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the professor. His was the power and the money and the influence. He was the proprietor of the paper and its editor and sub-editor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the Judge. -- Virginia Woolf
Mr Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty. -- Virginia Woolf
They neither work nor weep; in their shape is their reason. -- Virginia Woolf
(...) there it had happened; the old ecstasy of life; its invincible assault; for it was unpleasant, at the same time that it rejoiced and rejuvenated and filled the veins and nerves with threads of ice and fire; it was terrifying. -- Virginia Woolf
It's the writing, not the being read, that excites me. Joy is in the doing. -- Virginia Woolf
Youth, youth- something savage- something pedantic. For example there is Mr. Masefield, there is Mr. Bennett. Stuff them into the flame of Marlowe and burn them to cinders. Let not a shred remain. Don't palter with the second rate. Detest your own age. Build a better one. -- Virginia Woolf
There's no doubt in my mind that I've found out how to begin at this age to say sth in my own voice
and that interests me so that I can go ahead without any : ) praise -- Virginia Woolf
It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of woman's life is that ... -- Virginia Woolf
So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing -- Virginia Woolf
You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight. -- Virginia Woolf
But what little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes, and not only to my eyes; also to some nervous fibre, or fanlike membrane in my species. -- Virginia Woolf
So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living. -- Virginia Woolf
She had influenced him more than any person he had ever known. And always in this way coming before him without his wishing it, cool, ladylike, critical; or ravishing, romantic. -- Virginia Woolf
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control. -- Virginia Woolf
Books - books - books," said Helen, in her absent-minded way. "More new books - I wonder what you find in them ... -- Virginia Woolf
I put my bare hand on her bare hand and felt, "This is genuine. There can be no mistake about this. -- Virginia Woolf
Heaven has mercifully decreed that the secrets of all hearts are hidden so that we are lured on for ever to suspect something, perhaps, that does not exist. -- Virginia Woolf
Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. -- Virginia Woolf
it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, -- Virginia Woolf
Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the -- Virginia Woolf
And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by
her shoes and her gloves. -- Virginia Woolf
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in. -- Virginia Woolf
The immense success of our life is, I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it. -- Virginia Woolf
For one's children so often gave one's own perceptions a little thrust forwards. -- Virginia Woolf
He was thinking of himself and the impression he was making, as she could tell by the sound of his voice, and his emphasis and his uneasiness. -- Virginia Woolf
She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own ... -- Virginia Woolf
What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once. -- Virginia Woolf
But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in. -- Virginia Woolf
I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another. -- Virginia Woolf
But language is wine upon his lips -- Virginia Woolf
Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life? -- Virginia Woolf
But the noise!" she said. "The noise!" "The sign of a successful party. -- Virginia Woolf
I am clouded and bruised with the print of minds and faces and things so subtle that they have smell, colour, texture, substance, but no name. -- Virginia Woolf
I am reading Henry James ... and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber. -- Virginia Woolf
But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them. -- Virginia Woolf
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant. -- Virginia Woolf
And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life. --