Virginia Woolf Quotes
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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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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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Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.
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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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...she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.
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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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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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Language is wine upon the lips.
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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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A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life
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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.
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It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
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For we think back through our mothers if we are women.
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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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The artist after all is a solitary being.
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Use words that soak up life.
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When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
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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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A perfect treat must include a trip to a second-hand bookshop.
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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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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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Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.
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I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.
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At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.