Virginia Woolf Quotes
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Words belong to each other.
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The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass
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They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid-ocean, and see every detail of each others' faces, and hear whatever they chanced to say.
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Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.
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All extremes of feeling are allied to madness.
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Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.
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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
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I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.
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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.
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It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.
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How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?
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The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.
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Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.
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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.
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People only become writers if they can't find the one book they've always wanted to read.
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I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
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Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these – ‘Chloe liked Olivia…’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.
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It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.
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They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort.
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If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women.
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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.
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I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual
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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.
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All extremes are dangerous.