Virginia Woolf Quotes
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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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Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.
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For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.
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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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Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.
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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.
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It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.
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I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.
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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.
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If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
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These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
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Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
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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.
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Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
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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.
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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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Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read; what I haven't read.
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Long ago I realized that no other person would be to me what you are.
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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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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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Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.
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The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
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The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.