Virginia Woolf Quotes
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The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.
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Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.
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But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them.
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If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.
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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.
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And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
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I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.
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Whenever you see a board up with "Trespassers will be prosecuted," trespass at once.
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My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.
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And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.
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For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping.
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They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought.
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The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.
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I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.
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Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
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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.
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Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.
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I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.
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Yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.
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Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face - as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought.
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Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
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One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.
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Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
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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?