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Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 28

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

I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.

I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.

Love, Thinking, Fiction

Life's bare as a bone.

Life, Bones

Travelers are much at the mercy of phrases ... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains.

Brain, Phrases, Mercy

The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.

Moon, Voice, Rivers

Virginia Woolf (2015). “The String Quartet”, p.5, Booklassic

women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. ... Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.

Dog, Stress, Writing

Virginia Woolf, Morag Shiach (1998). “A Room of One's Own: And, Three Guineas”, p.141

Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.

Running, Book, Thinking

I press to my centre, and find there is something there.

Centre, Presses

We seem to be riding on the top of the highest mast of the tallest ship; and yet at the same time we know that nothing of this sort matters; love is not proved thus, nor great achievements completed thus; so that we sport with the moment and preen our feathers in it lightly.

Sports, Love Is, Achievement

Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.182, Oxford University Press

She began framing the words of her telegram into a senseless singsong; so that several park keepers looked at her with suspicion and were only brought to a favourable opinion of her sanity by noticing the pearl necklace which she wore.

Singing, Necklaces, Pearls

"Orlando (Annotated): A Biography".

I do think all good and evil comes from words. I have to tune myself into a good temper with something musical, and I run to a book as a child to its mother.

Mother, Running, Children

Virginia Woolf (1975). “The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1888-1912 (Virginia Stephen)”, Harcourt on Demand

Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

Death, Tombstone, Memorial

The Waves (1931)

Nothing is stronger than the position of the dead among the living.

Stronger, Position

Now to sum it up,' said Bernard. 'Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we do not know each other (though I met you once I think, on board a ship going to Africa), we can talk freely. The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it were possible, I would hand it you entire. I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes. I would say, "Take it. This is my life.

Thinking, Break Off, Hands

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.175, Virginia Woolf

The root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.

Roots, Dirt

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2101, Delphi Classics

Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.

Book, Domes, Helping

Virginia Woolf (2005). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.611, Wordsworth Editions

There is a sadness at the back of life which some people do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure.

Sadness, People, Shadow

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2261, Delphi Classics

But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them.

Nature, Sunset, Russia

"Orlando (Annotated): A Biography".

and then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart.

Heart, Sea, Purple

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.506, Delphi Classics

The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpended the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a fingerprint of a shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.

Wall, Garden, Light

But what a little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes, and not only to my eyes; also to some nervous fibre, or fanlike membrane in my species.

Eye, Littles, Vivid

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4389, Delphi Classics

She tapped on the window with her embossed hairbrush. They were too far off to hear. The drone of the trees was in their ears; the chirp of birds; other incidents of garden life, inaudible, invisible to her in the bedroom, absorbed them. Isolated on a green island, hedged about with snowdrops, laid with a counterpane of puckered silk, the innocent island floated under her window. Only George lagged behind.

Garden, Islands, Bird

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.933, Wordsworth Editions

Safe! safe! safe!' the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry 'Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.

Happiness, Heart, Light

Virginia Woolf (2015). “Monday or Tuesday”, p.5, Virginia Woolf

But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter!

Beautiful, Eye, Winter

Virginia Woolf (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.303, OUP Oxford

Wind and storm colored July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed.

Wall, Tunnels, July

Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.

Brave, Letters, Lost

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.783, Delphi Classics

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