Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 20

Quotes about:

Adventure Affairs Age Aging Animals Art Austen

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.

Virginia Woolf

Moving, Play, Giving

5 Copy quote
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

Virginia Woolf

Men, Unity, Tablets

Virginia Woolf (2006). “To the Lighthouse”, p.92, OUP Oxford

9 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
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
The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?

Virginia Woolf

World, Mrs Dalloway, Raised

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.14, Broadview Press

6 Copy quote
Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.

Virginia Woolf

Lying, Vanity, Deceit

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.148, Broadview Press

6 Copy quote
Lord, how tired one gets of one's own writing.

Virginia Woolf

Writing, Tired, Lord

Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.189, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

6 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
Rhoda comes now, having slipped in while we were not looking. She must have made a tortuous course, taking cover now behind a waiter, now behind some ornamental pillar, so as to put off as long as possible the shock of recognition, so as to be secure for one more moment to rock her petals in her basin. We wake her. We torture her. She dreads us, she despises us, yet she comes cringing to our sides because for al our cruelty there is always some name, some face which sheds a radiance, which lights up her pavements and makes it possible for her to replenish her dreams.

Virginia Woolf

Dream, Light, Rocks

4 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
Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Virginia Woolf

Cat, Men, Surfing

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

9 Copy quote
Oh, I am in love with life!

Virginia Woolf

Love Life

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.47, ShandonPress

4 Copy quote
Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.

Virginia Woolf

Hate, Writing, Mean

Virginia Woolf (2015). “A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas”, p.111, OUP Oxford

4 Copy quote
Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response).

Virginia Woolf

Reading, Air, Doors

Virginia Woolf (2017). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5: 1929 - 1932”, p.298, Random House

4 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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

You May Also Like:

Florence Nightingale

Vita Sackville-West

Ernest Hemingway

Charles Dickens

Virginia Woolf

Follow

Born: January 25, 1882
Died: March 28, 1941
Occupation: Writer
Cite this Page: Citation

Popular Topics