Virginia Woolf Quotes

I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.

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

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

Use words that soak up life.

loveliness is infernally sad.

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.

All artists need a room of their own

Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.

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

You cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind.

It doesn't have to be the truth, just your vision of it, written down.

Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.

For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn.

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

I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me.

But the close withdrew: the hand softened. It was over-- the moment.

Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours.

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.

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

There was no treachery too base for the world to commit.

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

First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough.

No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.

There is something I want-something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed.

Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.

We insist, it seems, on living.

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

Oh, I am in love with life!

letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps - who knows? - we might talk by the way.

The poet is always our contemporary.

She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.

It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.

And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the misery, the grind, are forgotten everytime; and one launches another, and it seems sheer joy and buoyancy.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

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.

Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.

to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.

... pure honesty is a doubtful quality; it means often lack of imagination.

Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.

A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.

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.

One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, silence there ... the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art.

Nothing, I know, had any chance against death.

His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely knew whether they held dreams or realities...and in five minutes she had filled the shell of the old dream with the flesh of life.

Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.

My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.

After all, what is a lovely phrase? One that has mopped up as much Truth as it can hold.

Speech is an old torn net, through which the fish escape as one casts it over them.