Virginia Woolf Quotes

For women live much more in the past...they attach themselves to places.

A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.

To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze.

Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?

I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.

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

Alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know

Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death.

Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.

So that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again.

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.

... the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.

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

Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?

It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.

But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.

Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.

I will dream today; for I must unscrew my head somehow.

. . . to walk alone in London is the greatest rest.

To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them.

A million candles burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one

[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.

Lord, how tired one gets of one's own writing.

Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.

Peace was the third emotion. Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life.

What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.

You have been in every way all that anyone could be.... If anybody could have saved me it would have been you.

What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.

In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be pure--pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.

But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.

I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.

Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them.

Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.

Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day

I find that when I've seen a certain number of people my mind becomes like an old match box -- the part one strikes on, I mean.

Only longing can fill with more of itself.

Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought.

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

After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.

When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.

I said I was impressed, Martha. I'm beside myself with jealousy. What do you want me to do, throw up?

How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world.

I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.

Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall.

At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever