Virginia Woolf Quotes
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Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
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Of the rest some we know to be dead though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six.
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Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
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He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds-that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.
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Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.
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What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know ... I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.
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A light here required a shadow there.
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If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?
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The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.
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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.
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The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
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And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.
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Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
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Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
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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.
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Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
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To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.
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Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words.
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I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.
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I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.
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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?
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London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... To walk alone through London is the greatest rest.
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And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.
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Arrange whatever pieces come your way.