Virginia Woolf Quotes
-
And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.
-
For we think back through our mothers if we are women.
-
Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?
-
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
-
I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.
-
Tragedies come in the hungry hours.
-
madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!" "I'm dead, sir!" she replied. A few minutes later, they became engaged.
-
Oh, I am in love with life!
-
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.
-
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.
-
A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life
-
Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.
-
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.
-
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
-
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
-
It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.
-
I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.
-
Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.
-
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
-
To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?
-
I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual
-
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.
-
A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.