Virginia Woolf Quotes
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What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.
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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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Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.
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I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.
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Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
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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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it is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams
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There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.
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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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The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.
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The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.
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Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?
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I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.
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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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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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They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
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The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.
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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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He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds-that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.
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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.
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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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Life stand still here.
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I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.
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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