Virginia Woolf Quotes
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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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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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Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.
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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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Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
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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 need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.
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It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
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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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With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes -- one of the tragedies of married life.
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Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall
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Tell me", he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how to speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depth of the sea instead?
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When she read just now to James, 'and there were numbers of soldiers with kettledrums and trumpets,' and his eyes darkened, she thought, why should they grow up, and lose all that?
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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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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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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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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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Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
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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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But the close withdrew: the hand softened. It was over-- the moment.
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The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.
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Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
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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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It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole. This wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together