Virginia Woolf Quotes
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Criticism? An artist wants praise. Praise.
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Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.
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Jealousy ... survives every other passion of mankind.
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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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Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?
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O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!
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We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.
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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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Use words that soak up life.
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She fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea.
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Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
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... why do people who live in the country always give themselves such airs?
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Nothing could be slow enough, nothing lasts too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Barton when they were all talking, to look at the sky; seen it between peoples shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep. She walked to the window.
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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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I am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold.
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I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.
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As a woman, I have no country
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When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
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Peace was the third emotion. Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life.
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Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
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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.
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It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.
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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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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.