Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 22

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Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.

Virginia Woolf

Flower, Tree, Darkness

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.68, Broadview Press

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Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.

Virginia Woolf

Taken, Thinking, People

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.10, Broadview Press

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Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.

Virginia Woolf

Landscape, Might, Tongue

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.422, Wordsworth Editions

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To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.

Virginia Woolf

Passion, Games, Feeling Alone

Virginia Woolf (2005). “The Waves”, p.43, Collector's Library

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And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

Virginia Woolf

Beautiful, Want, Prose

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4321, Delphi Classics

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To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.

Virginia Woolf

Morning, Home, Writing

Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.20, Oxford University Press

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A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.

Virginia Woolf

Writing, Use, Littles

Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.123, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the misery, the grind, are forgotten everytime; and one launches another, and it seems sheer joy and buoyancy.

Virginia Woolf

Book, Writing, Joy

Virginia Woolf, Joanne Trautmann Banks (1975). “The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1923-1928”, Harcourt on Demand

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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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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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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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We [women] have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that ... takes time.

Virginia Woolf

Years, Age, Statistics

Virginia Woolf (2015). “A Room of One's Own: And Three Guineas”, p.85, Oxford University Press, USA

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

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