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Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 22

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

Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves

Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.

Night, Light, Years

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.343, Wordsworth Editions

You can't think how I depend on you, and when you're not there the colour goes out of my life.

Thinking, Thank You Sister, Colour

It is the duty of the writer to describe.

Duty

A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.

Always Trying, Trying, Sides

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.294, Wordsworth Editions

To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bend her head as if to let her pelt f jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked.

Dirty, Thinking, People

...the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.

Beautiful, Butterfly, Wings

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.367, Wordsworth Editions

The good diarist writes either for himself alone or for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is need neither of affectation nor of restraint. Sincerity is what they ask, detail, and volume; skill with the pen comes in conveniently, but brilliance is not necessary; genius is a hindrance even; and should you know your business and do it manfully, posterity will let you off mixing with great men, reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the first ladies in the land.

Writing, Men, Land

Virginia Woolf (1967). “Collected essays”

A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

Lying, People, Feelings

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.184, Broadview Press

A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.

Art, Knowing, Play

Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie (1986). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925-1928”, Chatto & Windus

We [women] have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that ... takes time.

Years, Age, Statistics

Virginia Woolf (2015). “A Room of One's Own: And Three Guineas”, p.85, Oxford University Press, USA

No passion is stronger in the breast of 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. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party - for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue - but these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water.

Party, Believe, Passion

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.178, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In each of us two powers preside, one male, one female: and in the man's brain, the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman's brain, the woman predominates over the man...If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties.

Men, Two, Brain

Wat a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.

Book, Thinking, Forever

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4448, Delphi Classics

I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.

Believe, Expression, Don't Believe

Virginia Woolf (1975). “The letters of Virginia Woolf”

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

Feelings, Machines, Critical Moments

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1120, Delphi Classics

Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?

Stars, Hero, Book

Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.28, Virginia Woolf

There was a day when I liked writing letters -- it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains.

Passion, Writing, Gone

Virginia Woolf (1975). “The letters of Virginia Woolf”

For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.

Morning, Sight, Years

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Collected Novels of Virginia Woolf - Volume II - Between the Acts, Mrs Dalloway, Orlando”, p.290, Read Books Ltd

Submit to me." So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore, wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen alseep, she thought; were free like smoke, were free to come and go like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought.

People, Suffering, Ghost

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.

Running, Memories, Wind

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.436, Wordsworth Editions

The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass

Real, Home, Leaves Of Grass

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3129, Delphi Classics

To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?

World, Facts, Whole

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Writing, Attachment, Play

"A Room of One's Own". Essay by Virginia Woolf (Chapter 3, pp. 43-44), October 24, 1929.

It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.

Taken, Dancing, Down And

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2897, Delphi Classics

But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

Solitude, Undoing

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

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