Virginia Woolf Quotes
I grow numb; I grow stiff. How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?
more and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will.
There are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, and if one can neithre feel nor think, where's one?
People only become writers if they can't find the one book they've always wanted to read.
When she read just now to James, 'and there were numbers of soldiers with kettledrums and trumpets,' and his eyes darkened, she thought, why should they grow up, and lose all that?
Nothing shakes my opinion of a book. Nothing -- nothing. Only perhaps if it's the book of a young person -- or of a friend -- no, even so, I think myself infallible.
The immense success of our life is, I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it.
How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.
About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.
Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.
So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball
I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.
Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.
How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?
It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.
Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying.
It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.
I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.
But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them.
I see through most people; I'm hardly ever wrong. I see at once what they've got in them.
Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.
To be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.
It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house.
It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man.
I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living.
For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.
I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.
There was a serenity about him always that had the look of innocence, when, technically, the word was no longer applicable.
For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.
