Virginia Woolf Quotes
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She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was however; there she was.
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... it's been a perpetual discovery, my life. A miracle.
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I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?
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She felt, with her hand on the nursery door, that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically (the feeling was one of relief and happiness) it was all one stream.
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The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.
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It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
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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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Language is wine upon the lips.
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Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One's Mind about Another Person.
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Sir, I would trust you with my heart. Moreover, we have left our bodies in the banqueting hall. Those on the turf are the shadows of our souls.
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But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful.
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...she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
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It was love, she thought, love that never clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of human gain. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem.
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Nothing shakes my opinion of a book. Nothing -- nothing. Only perhaps if it's the book of a young person -- or of a friend -- no, even so, I think myself infallible.
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If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy.
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Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.
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Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.
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There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.
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To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
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Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that
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Use words that soak up life.
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Criticism? An artist wants praise. Praise.
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I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
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Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.