Virginia Woolf Quotes
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When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.
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Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. More than anything... it calls for confidence in oneself...And how can we generate this imponderable quality most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.
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Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
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But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.
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And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.
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Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.
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What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself- a voice answering a voice.
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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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Thinking is my fighting.
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I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.
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It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
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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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You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
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Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.
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Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
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A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
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This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.
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The proper stuff of fiction' does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.
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By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream
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But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.
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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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At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.
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Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
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When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.