Virginia Woolf Quotes
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It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house.
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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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Fear no more, says the heart.
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Women alone stir my imagination.
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The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
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madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!" "I'm dead, sir!" she replied. A few minutes later, they became engaged.
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Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations.
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I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.
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The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness
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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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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.
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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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Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
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For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.
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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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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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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 connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
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A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life
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A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
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But words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf.
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I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
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First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
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Lord, how tired one gets of one's own writing.