Authors — Quotes

Virginia Woolf Quotes: 75

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
A Room of One's Own
Books are the mirrors of the soul.
Between the Acts
Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
A Room of One's Own
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.
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.
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
A Room of One's Own
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.
Orlando
A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.
Orlando
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.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
A Room of One's Own
To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...
For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
Orlando
What does the brain matter compared with the heart?
Mrs. Dalloway
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
A Room of One's Own
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
A Room of One's Own
It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
Mrs. Dalloway
The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.
Between the Acts
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
A Room of One's Own
To love makes one solitary.
Mrs. Dalloway
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure
She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
To the Lighthouse
For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.
The Waves
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
Moments of Being
About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.
To the Lighthouse
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
Orlando
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of treesand changing leaves.
To the Lighthouse
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.
Orlando
For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.
A Room Of One's Own And Three Guineas
He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
Orlando
When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.
Jacob's Room
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
Orlando
Life stand still here.
Mrs. Dalloway
No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.
Orlando
By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
Orlando
Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?
A Room of One's Own
Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.
A Room of One's Own
Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.
The Waves
First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.
Mrs. Dalloway
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.
Jacob's Room
For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
A Room of One's Own
Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.
The Waves
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. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.
Street haunting
For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
Orlando
The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
Orlando
Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.
The Second Common Reader
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
Jacob's Room
anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
Jacob's Room
My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.
Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf
It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.
A Room of One's Own
Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
Orlando
For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.
Orlando
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.
The Common Reader
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.
Jacob's Room
Beneath my eyes opens -- a book; I see to the bottom; the heart -- I see to the depths. I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart.
The Waves
Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!
Mrs. Dalloway
Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?
Orlando
No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes
A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
Orlando
The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful.
The Waves
Septimus has been working too hard"- that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.
Mrs. Dalloway
in this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow... (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house & grounds)
To the Lighthouse