Virginia Woolf Quotes
-
Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.
-
For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.
-
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 a thousand pities never to say what one feels.
-
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.
-
Yes, yes, I'm coming. Right up the top of the house. One moment I'll linger. How the mud goes round in the mind-what a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts itself, and a gain through the eyes one sees clear and still, and there comes to the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those one nods to, the one never meets again.
-
Do not move, do not go. Sink within this moment. Hold it for ever.
-
All extremes are dangerous.
-
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
-
Criticism? An artist wants praise. Praise.
-
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.
-
They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort.
-
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.
-
When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
-
The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness
-
Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.
-
I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
-
Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.
-
I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.
-
The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.
-
Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes. Virginia Woolf
-
The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.
-
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.
-
I will achieve in my life - Heaven grant that it be not long - some gigantic amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to me. Out of my suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will enter.