Virginia Woolf Quotes
-
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
-
He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.
-
Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
-
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.
-
What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.
-
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?
-
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.
-
Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
-
Why have I so little control? It is the case of much waste and pain in my life.
-
She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust.
-
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.
-
Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.
-
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
-
It is no use trying to sum people up.
-
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.
-
Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.
-
But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
-
The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.
-
For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.
-
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.
-
Finally, I would thank, had I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America, who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the entomology, the geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine and will, I hope, not spare his services on the present occasion.
-
After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.
-
Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you
-
Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.