Virginia Woolf Quotes
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One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.
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a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.
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Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.
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I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.
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Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
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Only longing can fill with more of itself.
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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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A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.
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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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Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.
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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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When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre
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Life would split apart without letters.
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The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
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I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.
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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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You have been in every way all that anyone could be.... If anybody could have saved me it would have been you.
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Without self awareness we are as babies in the cradles.
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it is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams
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I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me.
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And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.
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For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.
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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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Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.