Virginia Woolf Quotes
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How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
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Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.
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To enjoy freedom ... we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose.
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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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Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
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Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations.
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I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
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I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
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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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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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Well, we must wait for the future to show.
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Fear no more, says the heart.
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Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than any words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.
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It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.
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Thoughts without words… Can that be?
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It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man.
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Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
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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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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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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.
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Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth.
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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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A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.
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I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.