Virginia Woolf Quotes
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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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For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.
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The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.
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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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Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
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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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It is no use trying to sum people up.
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The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life - the number of children, whether she had money of her own, if she had a room to herself, whether she had help bringing up her family, if she had servants, whether part of the housework was her task - it is only when we can measure the way of life and experience made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer.
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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.
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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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The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.
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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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Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.
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But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
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I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.
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... the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.
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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?
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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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There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death.
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war is a man's game ... the killing machine has a gender and it is male.
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In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
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Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
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For now she need not think of anybody. She coud be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.
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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.