Virginia Woolf Quotes
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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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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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Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
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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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I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.
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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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The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.
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war is a man's game ... the killing machine has a gender and it is male.
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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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Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.
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One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.
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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 mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.
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Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.
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Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.