Virginia Woolf Quotes
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Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.
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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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Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.
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The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life - the number of children, whether she had money of her own, if she had a room to herself, whether she had help bringing up her family, if she had servants, whether part of the housework was her task - it is only when we can measure the way of life and experience made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer.
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Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.
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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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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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I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd.
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Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.
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Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
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Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
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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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For nothing was simply one thing.
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There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death.
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Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.
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The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process.
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Only longing can fill with more of itself.
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Death is woven in with the violets,” said Louis. “Death and again death.”)
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what she loved: life, London, this moment of june.
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I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
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But I think I’m coloured by my own wishes, & experimental mood.
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It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.
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Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.