Virginia Woolf Quotes
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Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.
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But the close withdrew: the hand softened. It was over-- the moment.
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Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.
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I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.
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I find that when I've seen a certain number of people my mind becomes like an old match box -- the part one strikes on, I mean.
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For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.
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The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.
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Peace was the third emotion. Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life.
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As a woman, I have no country
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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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You can't think how I depend on you, and when you're not there the colour goes out of my life.
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With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes -- one of the tragedies of married life.
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The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
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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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Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotchpotch of impulses, our perpetual miracle - for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death; let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.
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I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
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King old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always to to a good man, they say.
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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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Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.
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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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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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Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.