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Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 24

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

and even a tea party means apprehension, breakage

and even a tea party means apprehension, breakage

Party, Mean, Tea

Virginia Woolf (1983). “The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1931-1935”, Mariner Books

Nothing shakes my opinion of a book. Nothing -- nothing. Only perhaps if it's the book of a young person -- or of a friend -- no, even so, I think myself infallible.

Book, Thinking, Opinion

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4308, Delphi Classics

When she read just now to James, 'and there were numbers of soldiers with kettledrums and trumpets,' and his eyes darkened, she thought, why should they grow up, and lose all that?

Growing Up, Grows, Loses

"Selected Works of Virginia Woolf".

What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.

Taken, Humor, History

Am I alone in my egotism when I say that never does the pale light of dawn filter through the blinds of 52 Tavistock Square but I open my eyes and exclaim, "Good God! Here I am again!" not always with pleasure, often with pain; sometimes in a spasm.

Pain, Eye, Here I Am

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4270, Delphi Classics

Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?

Goes On, Made, Dose

Virginia Woolf, Michael H. Whitworth (2014). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.42, Oxford University Press, USA

O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.

Writing, Criticism, Breakfast

Virginia Woolf, Nigel Nicolson, Joanne Trautmann, Joanne Trautmann Banks (1975). “The Flight of the Mind”

Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost. Life would split asunder without them. 'Come to tea, come to dinner, what's the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the capital is wonderful; the Russian dancers....' These are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe.

Perfect, Dancer, Brave

People only become writers if they can't find the one book they've always wanted to read.

Book, People, Wanted

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

Flower, Mrs Dalloway, Said

Mrs. Dalloway pt. 1, sec. 1 (1925)

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.

Mistake, Reading, Writing

The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

Sea, Genius, Dripping

The Common Reader "Notes on an Elizabethan Play" (1925)

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be pure--pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.

Wine, Water, Literature

Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.14, Oxford University Press

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

Giving, Creative, Add

Virginia Woolf (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.232, OUP Oxford

A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.

Reading, Book, Passion

Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie (1986). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1912-1918”, Harcourt

... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bullyher, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.

Art, Criticism, And Love

Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.12, Oxford University Press

I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.

Writing, Diaries, Kind

"The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1915-1919".

But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.

Hatred, Our Love

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.702, Wordsworth Editions

So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood, - by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.

Blood, Hands, Knives

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.92, Broadview Press

Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above.

Sex, Opposites, Clothes

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.207, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.

Writing, Feels

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

For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.

Spiritual, House, World

Virginia Woolf, Morag Shiach (1998). “A Room of One's Own: And, Three Guineas”, p.365

Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.

Two, Imagination, Fiction

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3718, Delphi Classics

Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them.

Lying, May, Flow

Virginia Woolf (2015). “A Room of One's Own (Annotated)”, p.4, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.

Cat, Knowing, People

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.132, Wordsworth Editions

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