Virginia Woolf Quotes
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A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.
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People only become writers if they can't find the one book they've always wanted to read.
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First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
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Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.
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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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Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.
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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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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.
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For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.
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Do not move, do not go. Sink within this moment. Hold it for ever.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
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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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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.
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I have had my vision.
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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.
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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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Well, we must wait for the future to show.
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I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.
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Oh, I am in love with life!
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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.