Virginia Woolf Quotes
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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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Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.
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But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.
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To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.
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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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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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And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.
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Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.
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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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For now she need not think of anybody. She coud be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.
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Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
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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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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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Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.
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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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If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
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And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.
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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 ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me.
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Life would split apart without letters.
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I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.
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I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely.
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Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself.
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it is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams