Virginia Woolf Quotes
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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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Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.
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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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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 mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions.
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Without self awareness we are as babies in the cradles.
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Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.
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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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Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
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The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process.
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I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me.
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I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.
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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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For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.