Virginia Woolf Quotes
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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.
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Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations.
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Women alone stir my imagination.
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... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bullyher, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
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Like all very handsome men who die tragically, he left not so much a character behind him as a legend. Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face.
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Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.
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I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.
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Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
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I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.
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and even a tea party means apprehension, breakage
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To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
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A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.
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All artists need a room of their own
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Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.
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There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in.
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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.
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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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Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
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The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.
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Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
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Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.
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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.
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Do not move, do not go. Sink within this moment. Hold it for ever.
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Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.