Virginia Woolf Quotes
-
What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.
-
I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?
-
It is no use trying to sum people up.
-
Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
-
For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.
-
One must love everything.
-
Finally, I would thank, had I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America, who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the entomology, the geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine and will, I hope, not spare his services on the present occasion.
-
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.
-
He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a sparkle of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type.
-
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
-
The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.
-
After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.
-
Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.
-
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
-
... the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.
-
Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.
-
I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.
-
war is a man's game ... the killing machine has a gender and it is male.
-
But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
-
There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death.
-
How remorseless life is!
-
There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
-
In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
-
How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?