Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 22

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When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

Virginia Woolf

Philosophy, Medicine, Skins

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1291, Delphi Classics

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For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.

Virginia Woolf

Light, Torches, Olivia

Virginia Woolf, Morag Shiach (1998). “A Room of One's Own: And, Three Guineas”, p.109

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If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

Virginia Woolf

Women, Writing, Secret

Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.

Virginia Woolf

Peace, War, Clothes

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.797, Wordsworth Editions

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... the random talk of people who have no chance of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often, of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which will weave itself into the moment for ever.

Virginia Woolf

Beautiful, Light, People

Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.27, Oxford University Press

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It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

Virginia Woolf

Feelings, Machines, Critical Moments

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1120, Delphi Classics

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Conversation, fastidious goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will.

Virginia Woolf

Blood, Bricks, Goddess

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.918, Delphi Classics

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Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.

Virginia Woolf

Clouds, Sharks, Hands

Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.58, Virginia Woolf

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Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?

Virginia Woolf

Lying, Past, Reality

Virginia Woolf (2015). “Monday or Tuesday”, p.47, Virginia Woolf

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He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a sparkle of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type.

Virginia Woolf

Imagination, Matter, Way

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.176, Wordsworth Editions

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A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.

Virginia Woolf

Always Trying, Trying, Sides

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.294, Wordsworth Editions

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Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!

Virginia Woolf

Drawing, Rooms

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.29, Broadview Press

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Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?

Virginia Woolf

Stars, Hero, Book

Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.28, Virginia Woolf

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But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least in the nineteenth century, another characteristic which may be traced to the writer's sex. In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer's character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman's presence of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights.

Virginia Woolf

Sex, Character, Rights

Virginia Woolf (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.245, OUP Oxford

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Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?--startling, unexpected, unknown?

Virginia Woolf

Heart, Elderly, Air

Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.139, Virginia Woolf

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No passion is stronger in the breast of 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. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party - for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue - but these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water.

Virginia Woolf

Party, Believe, Passion

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

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The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom.

Virginia Woolf

Butterfly, Shade, Lasts

Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.83, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Men felt a chill in their hearts; a damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth,one subterfuge was tried after anothersentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics.

Virginia Woolf

Heart, Epic, Men

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I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

Virginia Woolf

Book, Army, Two

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.99, Wordsworth Editions

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And I will now rock the brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the waves. Some will founder. Some will dash themselves against the cliffs. One sails alone. That is my ship. It sails into icy caverns where the sea-bear barks and stalactites swing green chairs. The waves rise, their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads. They have scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship which mounts the wave and sweeps before the gale and reaches the islands where the parrots chatter and then the creepers.

Virginia Woolf

Light, Rocks, Swings

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1307, Delphi Classics

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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.

Virginia Woolf

Writing, Men, Land

Virginia Woolf (1967). “Collected essays”

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A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.

Virginia Woolf

Art, Knowing, Play

Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie (1986). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925-1928”, Chatto & Windus

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In each of us two powers preside, one male, one female: and in the man's brain, the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman's brain, the woman predominates over the man...If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties.

Virginia Woolf

Men, Two, Brain

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Wat a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.

Virginia Woolf

Book, Thinking, Forever

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4448, Delphi Classics

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To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bend her head as if to let her pelt f jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked.

Virginia Woolf

Dirty, Thinking, People

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

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