Virginia Woolf Quotes

It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge

She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

The streets of London have their map, but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?

It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.

For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.

One must learn to be silent just as one must learn to talk.

For we think back through our mothers if we are women.

They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.

I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.

I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.

The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.

Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it.

war is a man's game ... the killing machine has a gender and it is male.

How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

to teach without zest is a crime.

We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie asleep.

I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms.

If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?

The first duty of a lecturer: to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks, and keep on the mantelpiece forever.

I will go down with my colours flying.

Now the writer, I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of ... reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.

War is not women's history.

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.

Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

But words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf.

We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.

I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married

Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.

And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.

The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

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.

Still, life had a way of adding day to day

Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.

To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action.

It is no use trying to sum people up.

My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.

I have had my vision.

Life stand still here.

But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.

Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual