Virginia Woolf Quotes
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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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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 was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.
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I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.
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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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Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
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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.
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I have had my vision.
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The way to write well is to live intensely.
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Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes.
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For women live much more in the past...they attach themselves to places.
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Thoughts without words… Can that be?
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Lord, how tired one gets of one's own writing.
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O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.
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You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.
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History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.
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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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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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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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One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.
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I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.
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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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I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street.
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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.