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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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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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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Without self awareness we are as babies in the cradles.
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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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And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.
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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 like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.
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Life would split apart without letters.
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Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.
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war is a man's game ... the killing machine has a gender and it is male.
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When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
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You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.
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I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me.
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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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I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely.
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The root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.
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Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.
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To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.
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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.
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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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The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process.
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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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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.