Virginia Woolf Quotes
-
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
-
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
-
Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.
-
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.
-
... why do people who live in the country always give themselves such airs?
-
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.
-
Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.
-
Tragedies come in the hungry hours.
-
For we think back through our mothers if we are women.
-
Night had come—night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day.
-
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.
-
I am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold.
-
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth.
-
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.
-
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.
-
It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.
-
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
-
I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.
-
Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.
-
The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
-
Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.