Virginia Woolf Quotes
-
I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
-
The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
-
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
-
and even a tea party means apprehension, breakage
-
Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it.
-
Love ought to stop on both sides, don’t you think, simultaneously?’ He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake the sleepers. ‘But it won’t - that’s the devil,’ he added in the same undertone.
-
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.
-
For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
-
Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
-
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.
-
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
-
Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
-
The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
-
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.
-
The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of-man.
-
Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.
-
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.
-
I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.
-
All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side.
-
Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.
-
We scarcely wish to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.
-
If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.
-
For now she need not think of anybody. She coud be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.
-
Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.