Virginia Woolf Quotes
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Why have I so little control? It is the case of much waste and pain in my life.
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For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.
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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?
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Death is woven in with the violets,” said Louis. “Death and again death.”)
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How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world.
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Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
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A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.
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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.
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Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.
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Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.
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Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.
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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.
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For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.” — Virginia Woolf, The Waves
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For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.
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One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
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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.
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It is no use trying to sum people up.
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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.
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If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people readingfor the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.
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Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.
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One must love everything.
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London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... To walk alone through London is the greatest rest.
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The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.
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I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.