Virginia Woolf Quotes
-
Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.
-
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.
-
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
-
Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.
-
Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall
-
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
-
The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of-man.
-
To enjoy freedom ... we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose.
-
You can't think how I depend on you, and when you're not there the colour goes out of my life.
-
The truer the facts the better the fiction.
-
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.
-
For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.
-
I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
-
Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.
-
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.
-
The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
-
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?
-
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?
-
With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes -- one of the tragedies of married life.
-
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
-
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.
-
They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort.
-
There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.
-
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.