Virginia Woolf Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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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How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?
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The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.
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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 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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Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.
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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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To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.
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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 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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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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Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
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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 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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The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.
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I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.
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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 taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.