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Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 10

All Quotes Adventure Age Aging Art Beach Beauty Belief Bitterness Blame Bones Chaos Character Charity Children Communication Consciousness Country Creativity Criticism Darkness Death Desire Difficulty Diversity Doubt Duty Dying Earth Effort Essays Feelings Feminism Fighting Flying Freedom Friendship Funny Genius Giving Goodness Growing Up Happiness Hate Hatred Healing Heart Heaven History Home Honesty House Human Nature Hurt Illness Imagination Independence Inspiration Inspirational Intimacy Joy Judging Language Life Literature Love Lust Lying Madness Memories Moon Morning Motivational Nature Pain Passion Past Peace Perception Personality Philosophy Pleasure Praise Quality Reading Reality Reflection Running Sadness Safety Silence Silver Singing Skins Sleep Solitude Soul Spring Stress Style Suffering Tea Time Today Tragedy Travel Truth Vision Waiting Wall War Water Weed Wine Winter Writing

Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.

Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.

Running, Fingers

Virginia Woolf (2015). “A Room of One's Own: And Three Guineas”, p.24, Oxford University Press, USA

Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.

Poetry, Poet, Beacons Of Light

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.590, Wordsworth Editions

The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.

Mind, Fluttering, Capricious

Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.133, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold.

Flames, Gold, Icicles

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.742, Wordsworth Editions

I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.

Writing, Joy

"A Writer's Diary".

war is a man's game ... the killing machine has a gender and it is male.

War, Men, Games

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual

Optimistic, Writing, Usual

Virginia Woolf (1978). “The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol.2, 1920-1924”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.

Writing, Together, Crafts

Virginia Woolf (2006). “To the Lighthouse”, p.4, OUP Oxford

To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.

Reading, Delight, Chiefs

Virginia Woolf (2013). “The Common Reader”, p.63, Lulu Press, Inc

For there is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light.

Truth, Light, Giving

Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.95, Oxford University Press

They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.

Children, Growing Up, Long

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.277, Wordsworth Editions

So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.

Journey, Vivid, Illness

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.380, Wordsworth Editions

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth.

Truth, Business, Mean

"Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid".

Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

Names, Sometimes, Grain

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.59, Virginia Woolf

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

Writing, Darkness, Existence

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.97, Virginia Woolf

The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life - the number of children, whether she had money of her own, if she had a room to herself, whether she had help bringing up her family, if she had servants, whether part of the housework was her task - it is only when we can measure the way of life and experience made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer.

Children, Average, Numbers

Virginia Woolf (1980). “Virginia Woolf, women and writing”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

Consolation for those moments when you can't tell whether you're the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

Genius, World, Fool

I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.

Brain, September, Pears

Virginia Woolf (1975). “The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1888-1912 (Virginia Stephen)”, Harcourt on Demand

This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.

Echoes, Self, Sea

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1446, Delphi Classics

Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.

Reading, Thinking, Heaven

Virginia Woolf (1975). “The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1932-1935”

Nothing could be slow enough, nothing lasts too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Barton when they were all talking, to look at the sky; seen it between peoples shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep. She walked to the window.

Book, Sleep, Talking

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.193, Broadview Press

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!

Heart, Body, Want

Virginia Woolf (2016). “To the Lighthouse”, p.175, Virginia Woolf

Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.

Friendship, Women, Book

"Selected Works of Virginia Woolf".

I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely.

Lonely, Heart, Moon

Virginia Woolf (1976). “The Waves”, Chatto & Windus

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.

Library, Sanctuary, Spirit

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2597, Delphi Classics

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