Virginia Woolf Quotes
-
How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
-
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
-
for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge
-
Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.
-
Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.
-
A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.
-
Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.
-
To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?
-
There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in.
-
A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
-
It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.
-
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.
-
Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely.
-
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
-
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
-
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
-
To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action.
-
I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
-
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
-
So that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again.
-
Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.
-
Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.
-
Tragedies come in the hungry hours.
-
But words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf.