Virginia Woolf Quotes
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A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.
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Life stand still here.
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It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
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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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The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.
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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.
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Communication is truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty; to go down boldly and bring to light those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends to let them know it.
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I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.
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Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death.
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war is a man's game ... the killing machine has a gender and it is male.
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So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood, - by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.
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Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
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Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.
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No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes
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A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
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[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
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The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
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My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.
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The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.
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And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.
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When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.
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Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One's Mind about Another Person.
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Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
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Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.