Virginia Woolf Quotes
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... why do people who live in the country always give themselves such airs?
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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 want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.
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Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.
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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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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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Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.
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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.
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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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So that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again.
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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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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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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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I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.
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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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Wat a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.
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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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Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth.
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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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Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
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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.
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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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Tragedies come in the hungry hours.
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It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.