Virginia Woolf Quotes
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Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.
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Consolation for those moments when you can't tell whether you're the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.
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The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.
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Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.
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Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
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How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?
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Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?
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Thinking is my fighting.
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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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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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But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.
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The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.
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We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.
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Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
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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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It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
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Wine has a drastic, an astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I drink. Ascent of flowers, radiance and heat, are distilled here to a fiery, yellow liquid. Just behind my shoulder-blades some dry thing, wide-eyed, gently closes, gradually lulls itself to sleep. This is rapture. This is relief.
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When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.
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I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
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The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
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Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
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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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Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.
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I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin.