Virginia Woolf Quotes
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...she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
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[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
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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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Thinking is my fighting.
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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.
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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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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.
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if newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.
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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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Soup is cuisines kindest course
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It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
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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.
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She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.
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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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If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?
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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.
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At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.
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Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.
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I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.
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Language is wine upon the lips.
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Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
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One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.
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The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.
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I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.