Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 23

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I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices

Virginia Woolf

Suicide, Voice, Mad

Suicide note to her husband, 18 Mar. 1941

65 Copy quote
Wine has a drastic, an astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I drink. Ascent of flowers, radiance and heat, are distilled here to a fiery, yellow liquid. Just behind my shoulder-blades some dry thing, wide-eyed, gently closes, gradually lulls itself to sleep. This is rapture. This is relief.

Virginia Woolf

Flower, Wine, Sleep

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I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.

Virginia Woolf

Believe, Expression, Don't Believe

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

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She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was however; there she was.

Virginia Woolf

Beautiful, Clever, People

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.177, Wordsworth Editions

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Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.

Virginia Woolf

Night, Light, Years

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.343, Wordsworth Editions

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...solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen. *** Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again.

Virginia Woolf

Morning, Solitude, Looks

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To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.

Virginia Woolf

Song, Silly, Fall

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1221, Delphi Classics

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To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.

Virginia Woolf

Art, Reading, Difficult

Virginia Woolf (2013). “The Common Reader”, p.375, Lulu Press, Inc

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...the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.

Virginia Woolf

Beautiful, Butterfly, Wings

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.367, Wordsworth Editions

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That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.

Virginia Woolf

Glorious Life, Curves, Perfection

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.63, Virginia Woolf

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Yet, she said to herself, form the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this--love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.

Virginia Woolf

Beautiful, Judging, Rose

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Ao farol: To the lighthouse: Edição bilíngue português - inglês”, p.250, Editora Landmark LTDA

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Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

Virginia Woolf

Art, Mean, Wool

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4186, Delphi Classics

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He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.

Virginia Woolf

Space, Snow, Tree

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.96, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

47 Copy quote
A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

Virginia Woolf

Lying, People, Feelings

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.184, Broadview Press

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Submit to me." So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore, wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen alseep, she thought; were free like smoke, were free to come and go like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought.

Virginia Woolf

People, Suffering, Ghost

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The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.

Virginia Woolf

Romantic, Cutting, Romance

Virginia Woolf (2013). “The Common Reader”, p.187, Lulu Press, Inc

10 Copy quote
Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.

Virginia Woolf

Running, Memories, Wind

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.436, Wordsworth Editions

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It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.

Virginia Woolf

Taken, Dancing, Down And

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2897, Delphi Classics

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Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Virginia Woolf

Writing, Attachment, Play

"A Room of One's Own". Essay by Virginia Woolf (Chapter 3, pp. 43-44), October 24, 1929.

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Yes, yes, I'm coming. Right up the top of the house. One moment I'll linger. How the mud goes round in the mind-what a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts itself, and a gain through the eyes one sees clear and still, and there comes to the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those one nods to, the one never meets again.

Virginia Woolf

Weed, Prayer, Eye

Virginia Woolf (2014). “Monday or Tuesday: Eight Stories”, p.25, Simon and Schuster

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The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.

Virginia Woolf

Essence, Giving, Mind

"The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1918-1924".

18 Copy quote
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

Virginia Woolf

Strong Women, Adversity, People

Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.48, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

18 Copy quote
There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.

Virginia Woolf

Stars, Night, Clouds

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.46, Virginia Woolf

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Would there be trees if we didn't see them?

Virginia Woolf

Tree, Ifs

Virginia Woolf (2002). “The Years”, p.144, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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old emotions like old families have intermarried and have many connections.

Virginia Woolf

Connections, Emotion

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3206, Delphi Classics

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

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