Virginia Woolf Quotes
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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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Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.
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Consolation for those moments when you can't tell whether you're the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.
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In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether they were beggars or people of substance.
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I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.
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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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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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The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.
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What is meant by reality? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable - now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying
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The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.
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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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I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.
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The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.
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Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.
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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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How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?
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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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The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.
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With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.
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Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.
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The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
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I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.
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A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
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The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.