Virginia Woolf Quotes
-
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
-
The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.
-
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.
-
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.
-
For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.
-
There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in.
-
Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.
-
It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.
-
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.
-
It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.
-
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
-
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
-
Well, we must wait for the future to show.
-
It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.
-
I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.
-
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
-
Oh, I am in love with life!
-
If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man; some think even greater.
-
I have sometimes dreamt ... that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards -- their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble -- the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.
-
There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.
-
As nobody can possibly tell me whether one's writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one's own pleasure. I am sure of that.
-
madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!" "I'm dead, sir!" she replied. A few minutes later, they became engaged.
-
I have had my vision.
-
I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.