Virginia Woolf Quotes
-
My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?
-
A million candles burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one
-
There was a day when I liked writing letters -- it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains.
-
How remorseless life is!
-
In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
-
No, I'm not clever. I've always cared more for people than for ideas.
-
Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?
-
Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.
-
As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.
-
There are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, and if one can neithre feel nor think, where's one?
-
One must love everything.
-
The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now— James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too.
-
It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.
-
Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.
-
And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.
-
With my cheek leant upon the window pane I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be upon the massy wall of time, which is forever lifting and pulling and letting fresh spaces of life in upon us. May it be mine to taste the moment before it has spread itself over the rest of the world! Let me taste the newest and the freshest.
-
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.
-
Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.
-
At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial-and any question about sex is that-one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.
-
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
-
One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.
-
I prefer men to cauliflowers
-
a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.
-
We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments.