Virginia Woolf Quotes
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I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.
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My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.
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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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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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Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
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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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Books are the mirrors of the soul.
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She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust.
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What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.
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Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.
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The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.
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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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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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But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.
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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.
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A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
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There was a day when I liked writing letters -- it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains.
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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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Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.
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For now she need not think of anybody. She coud be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. 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... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.
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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. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.
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Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
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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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Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waves swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.