Virginia Woolf Quotes
-
Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.
-
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.
-
For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.
-
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Without self awareness we are as babies in the cradles.
-
It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.
-
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
-
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.
-
It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.
-
Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.
-
Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read; what I haven't read.
-
The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process.
-
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
-
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.
-
To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.
-
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.
-
Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.
-
Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.
-
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
-
No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes
-
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.