Virginia Woolf Quotes
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Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath.
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As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.
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If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people readingfor the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.
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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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I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely.
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And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.
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I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me.
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When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
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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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For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.
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Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.
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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.
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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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In the 18th century we knew how everything was done, but here I rise through the air, I listen to voices in America, I see men flying- but how is it done? I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.
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When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.
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Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.
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Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
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For nothing was simply one thing.
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A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.
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If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
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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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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.
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It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.
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Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker’s.