Virginia Woolf Quotes

Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.

But what a little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes, and not only to my eyes; also to some nervous fibre, or fanlike membrane in my species.

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.

Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker’s.

I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.

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

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read; what I haven't read.

The truer the facts the better the fiction.

As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

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

But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the teashop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him- he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily…he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then- that he could not feel.

You can't think how I depend on you, and when you're not there the colour goes out of my life.

But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them.

I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.

Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall.

Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms—his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought—making onself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and quite true; all this one could never share—it smashed to atoms.

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.

Does Nature supplement what man advanced? Or does she complete what he began?

The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn.

For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together

You would get longer livelier and more frequent letters from me, if it weren't for the Christian religion. How that bell tolling at the end of the garden, dum dum, dum dum, annoys me! Why is Christianity so insistent and so sad?

Does housekeeping interest you at all? I think it really ought to be just as good as writing and I never see where the separation between the too comes in. At least if you must put books on one side and life on the other, each is a poor and bloodless thing; but my theory is that they mix indistinguishable.

Soup is cuisines kindest course

Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.

Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in the room and through the waves came the voices of birds singing.

I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.

We read Charlotte Bronte not for exquisite observation of character - her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy - hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life - hers is that of a country parson's daughter; but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt.

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.

O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.

But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.

But the close withdrew: the hand softened. It was over-- the moment.

The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Above all you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world.

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side.

Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.

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

It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man.

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.

As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.