Virginia Woolf Quotes
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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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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.
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As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.
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And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is a woman's whole existence.
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I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.
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To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away.
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Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
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But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful.
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Rhoda comes now, having slipped in while we were not looking. She must have made a tortuous course, taking cover now behind a waiter, now behind some ornamental pillar, so as to put off as long as possible the shock of recognition, so as to be secure for one more moment to rock her petals in her basin. We wake her. We torture her. She dreads us, she despises us, yet she comes cringing to our sides because for al our cruelty there is always some name, some face which sheds a radiance, which lights up her pavements and makes it possible for her to replenish her dreams.
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This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
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Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them.
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The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
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No one would think of bringing a dog into church. For though a dog is all very well on a gravel path, and shows no disrespect to flowers, the way he wanders down an aisle, looking, lifting a paw, and approaching a pillar with a purpose that makes the blood run cold with horror ... a dog destroys the service completely.
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Marvelous are the innocent.
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Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.
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How can I express the darkness?
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The streets of London have their map, but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?
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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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We are about to part," said Neville. "Here are the boxes; here are the cabs. There is Percival in his billycock hat. He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unaswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. I shall propose a meeting - under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait and he will not come. It is for that that I love him.
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Twice Flush had done his utmost to kill his enemy; twice he had failed. And why had he failed, he asked himself? Because he loved Miss Barrett. Looking up at her from under his eyebrows as she lay, severe and silent on the sofa, he knew that he must love her for ever. Things are not simple but complex. If he bit Mr. Browning he bit her too. Hatred is not hatred; hatred is also love.
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I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.
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Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it.
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Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.
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All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.