Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 15

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• 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

  Virginia Woolf

  Powerful, World, Most Powerful

  Virginia Woolf (1995). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.95, Wordsworth Editions

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• Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.

  Virginia Woolf

  Stories, Substance, Goes On

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1428, Delphi Classics

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• What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment.

  Virginia Woolf

  Heart, Giving, Glimpse

  Virginia Woolf (1980). “The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1925-1930”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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• 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.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Reading, People

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• Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?

  Virginia Woolf

  Women, Army, Blessing

  Virginia Woolf, Morag Shiach (1998). “A Room of One's Own: And, Three Guineas”, p.146

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• There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.

  Virginia Woolf

  Country, Intelligent, Men

  Virginia Woolf (1942). “The death of the moth: and other essays”

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

  Virginia Woolf

  Sad, Knives, Orlando

  Virginia Woolf, Michael H. Whitworth (2014). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.28, Oxford University Press, USA

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• There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not. But, as I put down my glass I remember; I am engaged to be married. I am to dine with my friends tonight. I am Bernard.

  Virginia Woolf

  Adventure, Glasses, Tree

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.693, Wordsworth Editions

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• I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.

  Virginia Woolf

  Weed, Women, Lying

  Virginia Woolf (2005). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.687, Wordsworth Editions

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

  Virginia Woolf

  Mom, Mother, Thinking

  1929 A Room of One's Own, ch.4.

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• what she loved: life, London, this moment of june.

  Virginia Woolf

  June, London, Moments

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.4, Broadview Press

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• Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, People, Imperfection

  1925 The Common Reader, 'George Eliot'.

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• As for 'drawing you out,' please believe I don't do such things deliberately, with an object -- It's only that I am, as a rule, far more interested in people than they are in me -- But it makes me a nuisance, I know: only an innocent nuisance.

  Virginia Woolf

  Believe, Drawing, People

  Virginia Woolf, Joanne Trautmann Banks (1977). “A change of perspective”, Vintage

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• I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

  Virginia Woolf

  Notebook, Phrases, Stories

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.137, Virginia Woolf

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• If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people readingfor the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Reading, Mean

  Georg Brand, Virginia Woolf, Koizumi Yakumo, Hernández Felisberto (2017). “ON READING: Le plaisir de lire”, p.43, Pieffe Edizioni via PublishDrive

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• Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.

  Virginia Woolf

  Lying, Eye, Differences

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2751, Delphi Classics

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• I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.

  Virginia Woolf

  Hurt, Hate, Men

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.587, Wordsworth Editions

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• King old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always to to a good man, they say.

  Virginia Woolf

  Kings, Character, Cat

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• The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness

  Virginia Woolf

  Sleep, Night, Sea

  Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.112, Virginia Woolf

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• Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.

  Virginia Woolf

  Running, Philosophy, Hands

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1411, Delphi Classics

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• Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.

  Virginia Woolf

  Dream, Night, Hands

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.214, Virginia Woolf

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• 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.

  Virginia Woolf

  Arrogant, Assuming, Commoners

  Virginia Woolf, Michael H. Whitworth (2014). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.102, Oxford University Press, USA

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

  Virginia Woolf

  London, Walks

  Virginia Woolf (2009). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1929-1932”, Chatto & Windus

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• Use words that soak up life.

  Virginia Woolf

  Use

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• There is a sadness at the back of life which some people do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure.

  Virginia Woolf

  Sadness, People, Shadow

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2261, Delphi Classics

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