Virginia Woolf Quotes
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Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.
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Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.
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At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial-and any question about sex is that-one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.
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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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She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.
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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.
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And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.
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Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.
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We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments.
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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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Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
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Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.
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I prefer men to cauliflowers
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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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what she loved: life, London, this moment of june.
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War is not women's history.
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One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.
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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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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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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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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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To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.
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Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.
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I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.