Virginia Woolf Quotes
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I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.
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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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The way to write well is to live intensely.
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Lord, how tired one gets of one's own writing.
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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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Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
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Thoughts without words… Can that be?
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Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.
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Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost. Life would split asunder without them. 'Come to tea, come to dinner, what's the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the capital is wonderful; the Russian dancers....' These are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe.
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I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.
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There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.
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You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.
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The depths of the sea are only water after all.
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For women live much more in the past...they attach themselves to places.
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History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.
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Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.
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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.
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The large shiny black forehead of the first whale was no more than two yards from us when it sank beneath the surface of the water, then we saw the huge blue-black bulk glide quietly under the raft right beneath our feet. It lay there for some time, dark and motionless, and we held our breath as we looked down on the gigantic curved back of a mammal a good deal longer than the raft. Virginia Woolf
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I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.
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Still, life had a way of adding day to day
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It is equally vain,” she thought, “for you to think you can protect me, or for me to think I can worship you. The light of truth beats upon us without shadow, and the light of truth is damnably unbecoming to us both.
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The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is through our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life.
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For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.
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One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.