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Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 14

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

We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.

We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.

Book, Reading, People

Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.

Real, People, Laughing

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Collected Novels of Virginia Woolf - Volume I - The Years, The Waves”, p.26, Read Books Ltd

Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.

Time, Writing, Reflection

Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.21, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.

Lying, Eye, Differences

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2751, Delphi Classics

For we think back through our mothers if we are women.

Mom, Mother, Thinking

1929 A Room of One's Own, ch.4.

what she loved: life, London, this moment of june.

June, London, Moments

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.4, Broadview Press

I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.

Thinking, Facts, Want

Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2001). “The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction”, p.5, Oxford University Press, USA

Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

Book, People, Imperfection

1925 The Common Reader, 'George Eliot'.

As for 'drawing you out,' please believe I don't do such things deliberately, with an object -- It's only that I am, as a rule, far more interested in people than they are in me -- But it makes me a nuisance, I know: only an innocent nuisance.

Believe, Drawing, People

Virginia Woolf, Joanne Trautmann Banks (1977). “A change of perspective”, Vintage

I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

Notebook, Phrases, Stories

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.137, Virginia Woolf

I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.

Hurt, Hate, Men

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.587, Wordsworth Editions

I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.

Weed, Women, Lying

Virginia Woolf (2005). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.687, Wordsworth Editions

If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people readingfor the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.

Book, Reading, Mean

Georg Brand, Virginia Woolf, Koizumi Yakumo, Hernández Felisberto (2017). “ON READING: Le plaisir de lire”, p.43, Pieffe Edizioni via PublishDrive

Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.

Running, Philosophy, Hands

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1411, Delphi Classics

King old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always to to a good man, they say.

Kings, Character, Cat

Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.

Dream, Night, Hands

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.214, Virginia Woolf

The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness

Sleep, Night, Sea

Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.112, Virginia Woolf

For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone. "What is it to be in love?" she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea. Hypnotized by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew away, she rose, and within, her two books beneath her arm returned again, much as a soldier prepares for battle.

Book, Butterfly, Discovery

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.157, Delphi Classics

. . . to walk alone in London is the greatest rest.

London, Walks

Virginia Woolf (2009). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1929-1932”, Chatto & Windus

Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough.

Art, Real, World

O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!

Flower, Pages, Shakespeare's Sonnets

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.64, Virginia Woolf

These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

Time, Believe, Optimistic

Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.193, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.

Happiness, Littles, Strings

Virginia Woolf (1980). “The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1925-1930”, Chatto & Windus

It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man.

Art, Women, Men

Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.136, Oxford University Press

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.

Fall, Sight, Order

Virginia Woolf (2013). “The Common Reader”, p.122, Lulu Press, Inc

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