Virginia Woolf Quotes
-
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?
-
There is a sadness at the back of life which some people do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure.
-
Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
-
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.
-
At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.
-
Thinking is my fighting.
-
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.
-
Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.
-
It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.
-
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
-
The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.
-
Am I alone in my egotism when I say that never does the pale light of dawn filter through the blinds of 52 Tavistock Square but I open my eyes and exclaim, "Good God! Here I am again!" not always with pleasure, often with pain; sometimes in a spasm.
-
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.
-
A light here required a shadow there.
-
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.
-
But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.
-
But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them.
-
Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.
-
Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
-
One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.
-
Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?
-
Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?
-
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.
-
Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.