-
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
Virginia Woolf -
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
Virginia Woolf
-
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.
Virginia Woolf -
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
Virginia Woolf -
Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people - what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes.
Virginia Woolf -
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?
Virginia Woolf -
Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
Virginia Woolf -
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.
Virginia Woolf
-
These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
Virginia Woolf -
How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?
Virginia Woolf -
Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
Virginia Woolf -
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.
Virginia Woolf -
What is meant by reality? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable - now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying
Virginia Woolf -
Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.
Virginia Woolf
-
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.
Virginia Woolf -
Long ago I realized that no other person would be to me what you are.
Virginia Woolf -
I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.
Virginia Woolf -
To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!
Virginia Woolf -
With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.
Virginia Woolf -
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.
Virginia Woolf
-
Does housekeeping interest you at all? I think it really ought to be just as good as writing and I never see where the separation between the too comes in. At least if you must put books on one side and life on the other, each is a poor and bloodless thing; but my theory is that they mix indistinguishable.
Virginia Woolf -
He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash and hush of the sea.
Virginia Woolf -
Life stand still here.
Virginia Woolf -
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
Virginia Woolf