Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 30

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But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them.

Virginia Woolf

Nature, Sunset, Russia

"Orlando (Annotated): A Biography".

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The large shiny black forehead of the first whale was no more than two yards from us when it sank beneath the surface of the water, then we saw the huge blue-black bulk glide quietly under the raft right beneath our feet. It lay there for some time, dark and motionless, and we held our breath as we looked down on the gigantic curved back of a mammal a good deal longer than the raft.

Virginia Woolf

Time, Dark, Blue

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As a creator of character his peculiarity is that he creates wherever his eyes rest ... With such a power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire.

Virginia Woolf

Book, Character, Eye

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3106, Delphi Classics

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He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence.

Virginia Woolf

Reading, Sleep, Hands

Virginia Woolf (2016). “To the Lighthouse”, p.166, Tyché

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letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps - who knows? - we might talk by the way.

Virginia Woolf

Lonely, Communication, Journey

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.68, Wordsworth Editions

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Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers’ breath, of ropes of pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine.

Virginia Woolf

Drama, Flower, Wine

Virginia Woolf (2013). “The Common Reader”, p.56, Lulu Press, Inc

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Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death.

Virginia Woolf

Death, Men, Giving

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Wind and storm colored July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed.

Virginia Woolf

Wall, Tunnels, July

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All artists need a room of their own

Virginia Woolf

Artist, Needs, Rooms

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Travelers are much at the mercy of phrases ... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains.

Virginia Woolf

Brain, Phrases, Mercy

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Safe! safe! safe!' the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry 'Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.

Virginia Woolf

Happiness, Heart, Light

Virginia Woolf (2015). “Monday or Tuesday”, p.5, Virginia Woolf

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Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.

Virginia Woolf

Spiritual, Book, Writing

Virginia Woolf (1991). “Paper Darts”

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The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.

Virginia Woolf

Twilight, Moving, Knitting

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.56, Broadview Press

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Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.

Virginia Woolf

Time, Plot

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1933, Delphi Classics

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How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?

Virginia Woolf

Ghost Stories, Feelings, Our Love

Virginia Woolf (1967). “Collected essays”

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We seem to be riding on the top of the highest mast of the tallest ship; and yet at the same time we know that nothing of this sort matters; love is not proved thus, nor great achievements completed thus; so that we sport with the moment and preen our feathers in it lightly.

Virginia Woolf

Sports, Love Is, Achievement

Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.182, Oxford University Press

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For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said.

Virginia Woolf

Communication, Self, Two

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But the close withdrew: the hand softened. It was over-- the moment.

Virginia Woolf

Hands, Moments

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All looked distant and peaceful and strange. The shore seemed refined, far away, unreal. Already the little distance they had sailed had put them far from it and given it the changed look, the composed look, of something receding in which one has no longer any part.

Virginia Woolf

Distance, Peaceful, Looks

Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.128, Virginia Woolf

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She began framing the words of her telegram into a senseless singsong; so that several park keepers looked at her with suspicion and were only brought to a favourable opinion of her sanity by noticing the pearl necklace which she wore.

Virginia Woolf

Singing, Necklaces, Pearls

"Orlando (Annotated): A Biography".

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He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash and hush of the sea.

Virginia Woolf

Sweet, Memories, Voice

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.365, Wordsworth Editions

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Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.

Virginia Woolf

Running, Book, Thinking

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Walden - all his books, indeed - are packed with subtle, conflicting, and very fruitful discoveries. They are not written to prove something in the end. They are written as the Indians turn down twigs to mark their path through the forest. He cuts his way through life as if no one had ever taken that road before, leaving these signs for those who come after, should they care to see which way he went.

Virginia Woolf

Book, Taken, Cutting

Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie (1986). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1912-1918”, Harcourt

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Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people - what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes.

Virginia Woolf

Eye, Glasses, Mirrors

Virginia Woolf (2017). “A arte da brevidade: Contos”, p.7, Autêntica

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Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Virginia Woolf

Thinking, Years, Voice

Virginia Woolf (1989). “A Room of One's Own”, p.79, 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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