Virginia Woolf Quotes

She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable --- this interminable life.

She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... To walk alone through London is the greatest rest.

Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.

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

No, I'm not clever. I've always cared more for people than for ideas.

... why do people who live in the country always give themselves such airs?

Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.

Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.

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

But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.

I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth.

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.

All artists need a room of their own

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

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

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.

Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.

Yes, yes, I'm coming. Right up the top of the house. One moment I'll linger. How the mud goes round in the mind-what a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts itself, and a gain through the eyes one sees clear and still, and there comes to the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those one nods to, the one never meets again.

If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women.

One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.

One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.

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.

There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.

The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.

Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.

I have sometimes dreamt ... that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards -- their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble -- the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.

For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone. "What is it to be in love?" she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea. Hypnotized by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew away, she rose, and within, her two books beneath her arm returned again, much as a soldier prepares for battle.

I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.

And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.

It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.

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.

Now to sum it up,' said Bernard. 'Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we do not know each other (though I met you once I think, on board a ship going to Africa), we can talk freely. The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it were possible, I would hand it you entire. I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes. I would say, "Take it. This is my life.

... it's been a perpetual discovery, my life. A miracle.

Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.

If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?

Of the rest some we know to be dead though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

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

The good diarist writes either for himself alone or for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is need neither of affectation nor of restraint. Sincerity is what they ask, detail, and volume; skill with the pen comes in conveniently, but brilliance is not necessary; genius is a hindrance even; and should you know your business and do it manfully, posterity will let you off mixing with great men, reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the first ladies in the land.

We shall be the mouthpieces of the divine spirit—

Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face - as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought.

No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.