Virginia Woolf Quotes
-
The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.
-
All artists need a room of their own
-
A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.
-
I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual
-
We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Marvelous are the innocent.
-
The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.
-
... 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.
-
Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations.
-
Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.
-
But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the teashop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him- he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily…he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then- that he could not feel.
-
and even a tea party means apprehension, breakage
-
I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.
-
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
-
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.
-
I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.
-
Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.
-
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.
-
Do not move, do not go. Sink within this moment. Hold it for ever.
-
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.
-
But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.
-
Women alone stir my imagination.