Virginia Woolf Quotes
-
If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their sense. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. Humanity goes. Money making becomes so important that they must work by night as well as by day. Health goes. And so competitive do they become that they will not share their work with others though they have more themselves. What then remains of a human being who has lost sight, sound, and sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave.
-
We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
-
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.
-
Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words.
-
To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!
-
I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.
-
Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.
-
What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know ... I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.
-
Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?
-
They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.
-
No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes
-
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.
-
The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
-
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
-
I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.
-
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.
-
I find that when I've seen a certain number of people my mind becomes like an old match box -- the part one strikes on, I mean.
-
Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.
-
The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.
-
When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
-
Long ago I realized that no other person would be to me what you are.
-
and then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart.
-
It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man.
-
As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.