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Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 21

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Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was

Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?--startling, unexpected, unknown?

Heart, Elderly, Air

Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.139, Virginia Woolf

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

Women, Writing, Secret

Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Yet, she said to herself, form the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this--love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.

Beautiful, Judging, Rose

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Ao farol: To the lighthouse: Edição bilíngue português - inglês”, p.250, Editora Landmark LTDA

People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know.

Writing, People, Ask Me

The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.

Peace, War, Clothes

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.797, Wordsworth Editions

Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

Art, Mean, Wool

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4186, Delphi Classics

What a lark! What a plunge!

Larks, Plunge

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.45, Broadview Press

I must try to set aside half an hour in some part of my day, and consecrate it to diary writing. Give it a name and a place, and then perhaps, such is the human mind, I shall come to think it a duty, and disregard other duties for it.

Writing, Thinking, Names

"A Moment's Liberty". Book by Virginia Woolf, 1990.

So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living.

Life, Children, Silver

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4395, Delphi Classics

I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices

Suicide, Voice, Mad

Suicide note to her husband, 18 Mar. 1941

She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was however; there she was.

Beautiful, Clever, People

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.177, Wordsworth Editions

We scarcely wish to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.

Want, Feels, Humans

"Complete Works of Virginia Woolf".

Wine has a drastic, an astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I drink. Ascent of flowers, radiance and heat, are distilled here to a fiery, yellow liquid. Just behind my shoulder-blades some dry thing, wide-eyed, gently closes, gradually lulls itself to sleep. This is rapture. This is relief.

Flower, Wine, Sleep

... the random talk of people who have no chance of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often, of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which will weave itself into the moment for ever.

Beautiful, Light, People

Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.27, Oxford University Press

Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!

Drawing, Rooms

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.29, Broadview Press

That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.

Character, Mean, Thinking

Virginia Woolf (1932). “A Letter to a Young Poet”

And I will now rock the brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the waves. Some will founder. Some will dash themselves against the cliffs. One sails alone. That is my ship. It sails into icy caverns where the sea-bear barks and stalactites swing green chairs. The waves rise, their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads. They have scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship which mounts the wave and sweeps before the gale and reaches the islands where the parrots chatter and then the creepers.

Light, Rocks, Swings

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1307, Delphi Classics

Conversation, fastidious goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will.

Blood, Bricks, Goddess

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.918, Delphi Classics

Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.

Clouds, Sharks, Hands

Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.58, Virginia Woolf

If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.

Mean, Thinking, People

Men felt a chill in their hearts; a damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth,one subterfuge was tried after anothersentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics.

Heart, Epic, Men

It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.

Flower, Light, Long

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1031, Delphi Classics

That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.

Glorious Life, Curves, Perfection

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.63, Virginia Woolf

The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom.

Butterfly, Shade, Lasts

Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.83, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.

Light, Torches, Olivia

Virginia Woolf, Morag Shiach (1998). “A Room of One's Own: And, Three Guineas”, p.109

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