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Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 32

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

fishing teaches a stern morality; inculcates a remorseless honesty.

fishing teaches a stern morality; inculcates a remorseless honesty.

Honesty, Fishing, Morality

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3200, Delphi Classics

When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre

People, Tyres, Wheels

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.939, Delphi Classics

The profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait - whether to fish with worms or not.

Race, Fishing, Differences

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3201, Delphi Classics

Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.

Mean, Events, Littles

Virginia Woolf, Jeanne Schulkind (1976). “Moments of being: unpublished autobiographical writings”, Sussex University Press

I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.

Wall, Writing, Thinking

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4517, Delphi Classics

I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.

Father, Wish, Complacency

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.877, Delphi Classics

Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about.

Income, Purses, Bitterness

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.587, Wordsworth Editions

Nothing, I know, had any chance against death.

Chance, Knows

Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame

Skeletons, Effort, Habit

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.49, Broadview Press

What is meant by reality? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable - now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying

Reality, Light, Groups

Virginia Woolf, Morag Shiach (1998). “A Room of One's Own: And, Three Guineas”, p.143

Thus Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility; and Mr. Hemingway, but much less violently, follows suit.

Book, Self, Suits

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3669, Delphi Classics

Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in the room and through the waves came the voices of birds singing.

Air, Voice, Water

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.216, Wordsworth Editions

Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.

Years, One Day, Made

Virginia Woolf, Michael H. Whitworth (2014). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.136, Oxford University Press, USA

He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.

Beautiful, Wise, Ink

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.85, Broadview Press

Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that

Beauty, Past, Light

Virginia Woolf (1967). “Collected essays”, Hogarth P.

Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.

Thinking, Voice, Doubt

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4325, Delphi Classics

It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.

Play, Age, Impossible

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.592, Wordsworth Editions

The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.

Block, Fall, Names

Virginia Woolf (2015). “The Waves”, p.109, Booklassic

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Birthday, Running, People

1922 Jacob's Room, ch.6.

The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?

World, Mrs Dalloway, Raised

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.14, Broadview Press

The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Heart, Sleep, Thinking

1929 A Room of One's Own, ch.1.

The comparison between Coleridge and Johnson is obvious in so far as each held sway chiefly by the power of his tongue. The difference between their methods is so marked that it is tempting, but also unnecessary, to judge one to be inferior to the other. Johnson was robust, combative, and concrete; Coleridge was the opposite. The contrast was perhaps in his mind when he said of Johnson: "his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced.

Opposites, Differences, Judging

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3815, Delphi Classics

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Writing, Literature, Ifs

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4409, Delphi Classics

Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face - as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought.

Iron, Yellow, Nerves

Virginia Woolf (1984). “The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1936-1941”, Harcourt

You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight.

Writing, Garden, Rose

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