-
Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.
Virginia Woolf -
This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
Virginia Woolf
-
Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.
Virginia Woolf -
As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.
Virginia Woolf -
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
Virginia Woolf -
war is a man's game ... the killing machine has a gender and it is male.
Virginia Woolf -
I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.
Virginia Woolf -
She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was however; there she was.
Virginia Woolf
-
Thinking is my fighting.
Virginia Woolf -
The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.
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 -
A light here required a shadow there.
Virginia Woolf -
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.
Virginia Woolf -
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
Virginia Woolf
-
Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.
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 -
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 -
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.
Virginia Woolf -
We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.
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
-
Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.
Virginia Woolf -
I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.
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 -
So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.
Virginia Woolf