Virginia Woolf Quotes
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How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?
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I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.
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Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
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Only longing can fill with more of itself.
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My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.
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I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?
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Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
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what she loved: life, London, this moment of june.
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So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.
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The mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions.
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Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
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She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable --- this interminable life.
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Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.
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For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?
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No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.
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The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.
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She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!
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Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.
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In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.
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I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
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The history of most women is hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence.
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For nothing was simply one thing.
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I am rooted, but I flow.
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The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpended the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a fingerprint of a shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.