Virginia Woolf Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.

There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.

Long ago I realized that no other person would be to me what you are.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.

Would there be trees if we didn't see them?

old emotions like old families have intermarried and have many connections.

It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.

Do not move, do not go. Sink within this moment. Hold it for ever.

Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker’s.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.

To know whom to write for is to know how to write.

What a labour writing is ... making one sentence do the work of a page; that's what I call hard work.

Life's bare as a bone.

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

... I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.

What a comfort is friendship in this world.

If this were the time or the place to uphold a paradox, I am half inclined to state that Norfolk is one of the most beautiful of counties.

Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.

There are no teachers, saints, prophets, good people, but the artists.

The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it.

For there is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light.

There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in.

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

... the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depend.

Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any.

Theories then are dangerous things.

How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?

But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality has no such simple effect upon the mind of man.

Happily, at forty-six I still feel as experimental and on the verge of getting at the truth as ever.

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

Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?

The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls unrecorded.

Does Nature supplement what man advanced? Or does she complete what he began?

I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement.

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.

writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.

But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

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.

fishing teaches a stern morality; inculcates a remorseless honesty.

In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.

I was so pleased and excited by your letter that I trotted about all day like a puppy with a bone.

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.