Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 20

Quotes about:

• The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is through our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life.

  Virginia Woolf

  Plato, Eye, Vision

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.123, Virginia Woolf

  12 Copy quote

• scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman's rifle; the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you, not by us. Obviously there is for you some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting which we have never felt or enjoyed.

  Virginia Woolf

  Fighting, Bird, Satisfaction

  Virginia Woolf (2014). “Three Guineas (Annotated)”, p.81, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the features from faces. People might walk through me. And what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar - forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel; our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.

  Virginia Woolf

  Dream, Thinking, Two

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.691, Wordsworth Editions

  14 Copy quote

• Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect ... He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes ... He is without doubt the prince of his profession.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Men, Perfect

  4 Copy quote

• Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today -- that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past.

  Virginia Woolf

  Marriage, Memories, Writing

  4 Copy quote

• No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes

  Virginia Woolf

  Believe, Passion, Men

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.178, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  7 Copy quote

• I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Thinking, Mood

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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Virginia Woolf

  Fall, Heart, Sea

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.39, Broadview Press

  6 Copy quote

• The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.

  Virginia Woolf

  Dark, Thinking, Best Things

  Virginia Woolf, Anne Olivier Bell (1977). “The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1915-1919”, Chatto & Windus

  7 Copy quote

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

  Virginia Woolf

  Voice, Doubt, Mind

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4325, Delphi Classics

  7 Copy quote

• But I think I’m coloured by my own wishes, & experimental mood.

  Virginia Woolf

  Thinking, Wish, Mood

  Virginia Woolf (1978). “The Diary of Virginia Woolf: 1920-1924”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

  7 Copy quote

• She fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea.

  Virginia Woolf

  Sea, Water, Sound

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.299, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Virginia Woolf

  Happiness, Taxi Cabs, Sea

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.132, Wordsworth Editions

  9 Copy quote

• If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

  Virginia Woolf

  Country, Sex, Fighting

  Three Guineas pt. 3 (1938)

  4 Copy quote

• Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.

  Virginia Woolf

  Luck, World, May

  Virginia Woolf (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.311, OUP Oxford

  7 Copy quote

• Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

  Virginia Woolf

  Nature, Tears, Together

  Virginia Woolf, Michael H. Whitworth (2014). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.13, Oxford University Press, USA

  7 Copy quote

• 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. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Sacrifice, Hair

  Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee (2000). “A room of one's own and other essays”

  7 Copy quote

• There was a day when I liked writing letters -- it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains.

  Virginia Woolf

  Passion, Writing, Gone

  Virginia Woolf (1975). “The letters of Virginia Woolf”

  7 Copy quote

• I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases.

  Virginia Woolf

  Mother, Children, Lying

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1452, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

• For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.

  Virginia Woolf

  Morning, Sight, Years

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Collected Novels of Virginia Woolf - Volume II - Between the Acts, Mrs Dalloway, Orlando”, p.290, Read Books Ltd

  7 Copy quote

• I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement.

  Virginia Woolf

  Mind, Finals, Notes

  Virginia Woolf (2005). “The Waves”, p.161, Collector's Library

  4 Copy quote

• The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass

  Virginia Woolf

  Real, Home, Leaves Of Grass

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3129, Delphi Classics

  7 Copy quote

• To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?

  Virginia Woolf

  World, Facts, Whole

  7 Copy quote

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

  Virginia Woolf

  Men, Doe, Supplements

  4 Copy quote

• Tell me", he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how to speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depth of the sea instead?

  Virginia Woolf

  Men, Sea, Ideas

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1145, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

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