Virginia Woolf Quotes
-
He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
-
To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination.
-
And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.
-
Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall
-
Words belong to each other.
-
All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.
-
It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.
-
Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.
-
I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices
-
It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house.
-
All extremes are dangerous.
-
We scarcely wish to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.
-
For now she need not think of anybody. She could 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.
-
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.
-
Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.
-
Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
-
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.
-
All artists need a room of their own
-
I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual
-
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
-
What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment.
-
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
-
Women alone stir my imagination.
-
We insist, it seems, on living.