Virginia Woolf Quotes

Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life?

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.

the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string

She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose.

My head is a hive of words that won't settle.

The voice of protest is the voice of another and an ancient civilization which seems to have bred in us the instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and understand.

Your image has receded till it is like the thinnest shadow of the old moon... a thin silver edge appeared, and now you hang like a sickle over my life.

The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks—so it sounded.

Pretty Stones

Up goes the rocket. Its golden grain falls, fertilising, upon the rich soil of my imagination.

It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she would be woven...

If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills - than my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.

Thoughts are divine.

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.

But when we sit together, close, ’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.

How could one leap on the back of life and wring its scruff?

I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.

This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.

When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.

But language is wine upon his lips

She came from the most worthless of classes - the rich, with a smattering of culture.

Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels, he thought...

Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with these silences.

They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love

I am not one and simple, but complex and many.

I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and butter

Kind old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always go to a good man, they say[.]

How could any Lord have made this world?... there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for this world to commit... No happiness lasted.

She seemed a compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine ...

What is nobler, " she mused, turning over the photographs, "than to be a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty?

Let us not take it for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

I reach my object and say, Wander no more. All else is trial and make-believe.

I burn, I shiver, out of this sun, into this shadow.

. . . distant views seemed to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest.

I begin to be impatient of solitude - to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me.

But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything.

He is precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the rest of his life.

I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun.

the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water

One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.

so that it may grow fatter and

The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.

It was awful, he cried, awful, awful!Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.

But when she looked at Prue tonight, she saw this was not now quite true of her. She was just beginning, just moving, just descending.

I have felt that odd whirr of wings in the head.

I am reading Henry James… and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.

All raw, uncooked, protesting."(on Aldous Huxley)

Oh, to awake from dreaming!