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Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 16

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

There are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, and if one can neithre feel nor think, where's one?

There are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, and if one can neithre feel nor think, where's one?

Thinking, Moments, Feels

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.

Flower, Practice, Rose

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.411, Wordsworth Editions

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.

Fall, Reading, Writing

Virginia Woolf, Michael H. Whitworth (2014). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.46, Oxford University Press, USA

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.

Wall, Years, Bricks And Mortar

Virginia Woolf (2005). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.617, Wordsworth Editions

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

Glowing, Romance, Together

Virginia Woolf (1990). “A moment's liberty: the shorter diary”, Vintage

Rhoda comes now, having slipped in while we were not looking. She must have made a tortuous course, taking cover now behind a waiter, now behind some ornamental pillar, so as to put off as long as possible the shock of recognition, so as to be secure for one more moment to rock her petals in her basin. We wake her. We torture her. She dreads us, she despises us, yet she comes cringing to our sides because for al our cruelty there is always some name, some face which sheds a radiance, which lights up her pavements and makes it possible for her to replenish her dreams.

Dream, Light, Rocks

every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.

Hands, People, Soul

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.499, Wordsworth Editions

Oh, I am in love with life!

Love Life

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.47, ShandonPress

I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me.

Water, Save Me, Rough

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.94, ShandonPress

Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.

Life, Beats

Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.12, Virginia Woolf

I was lying in bed this morning and saying to myself, 'the remarkable thing about Ethel is her stupendous self-satisfaction' when in came your letter to confirm this profound psychological observation. How delighted I was!

Morning, Lying, Self

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

Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall

Fall, Heart, Sea

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.39, Broadview Press

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.

Hate, Writing, Mean

Virginia Woolf (2015). “A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas”, p.111, OUP Oxford

The poet is always our contemporary.

Poet, Contemporary

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

Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response).

Reading, Air, Doors

Virginia Woolf (2017). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5: 1929 - 1932”, p.298, Random House

I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.

Writing, Thinking, Species

Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.286, HMH

scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman's rifle; the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you, not by us. Obviously there is for you some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting which we have never felt or enjoyed.

Fighting, Bird, Satisfaction

Virginia Woolf (2014). “Three Guineas (Annotated)”, p.81, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

You would get longer livelier and more frequent letters from me, if it weren't for the Christian religion. How that bell tolling at the end of the garden, dum dum, dum dum, annoys me! Why is Christianity so insistent and so sad?

Christian, Garden, Bells

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

Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect ... He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes ... He is without doubt the prince of his profession.

Writing, Men, Perfect

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.

Writing, Thinking, Mood

Virginia Woolf (1980). “The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1925-1930”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today -- that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past.

Marriage, Memories, Writing

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

Fashion, Heart, Views

Virginia Woolf (1995). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.92, Wordsworth Editions

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Cat, Men, Surfing

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

...so now, Mrs. Ramsay thought, she could return to that dream land, that unreal but fascinating place, the Manning's drawing-room at Marlow twenty years ago; where one moved about without haste or anxiety, for there was no future to worry about. She knew what had happened to them, what to her. It was like reading a good book again, for she knew the end of that story, since it had happened twenty years ago, and life, which shot down even from this dining-room table in cascades, heaven knows where, was sealed up there, and lay, like a lake, placidly between its banks.

Dream, Reading, Book

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.315, Wordsworth Editions

Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.

Fiction, Burning, Slumber

Virginia Woolf (2015). “A Room of One's Own (Annotated)”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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