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Favourite quotes (21448)

“For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not simple as our friends would have us to meet their needs. Yet love is simple.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Bernard, section III
The Waves (1931)

“I am amused at my relations with her: left so ardent in January – and now what? Also I like her presence and her beauty. Am I in love with her? But what is love? Her being 'in love' with me, excites and flatters; and interests. What is this 'love?”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Thursday 20 May 1926
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

“Theirs, too, is the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.”

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

"Notes on an Elizabethan Play"
The Common Reader (1925)

“She alone spoke the truth; to her alone could he speak it. That was the source of her everlasting attraction for him, perhaps; she was a person to whom one could say what came into one's head.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Part III, Ch. 9
To the Lighthouse (1927)

“A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway (1925)

“Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.”

Virginia Woolf A Letter to a Young Poet

"A Letter to a Young Poet"
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)

“Lord, how I praise God that I had a bent strong enough to coerce every minute of my life since I was born! This fiddling and drifting and not impressing oneself upon anything – this always refraining and fingering and cutting things up into little jokes and facetiousness – that's what's so annihilating. Yet given little money, little looks, no special gift – what can one do? How could one battle? How could one leap on the back of life and wring its scruff?”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Thursday 20 February, 1930
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

“Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 2

“The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property; (2) that she was a woman which amounts to much the same thing …”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 4

“Morgan has the artist's mind; he says the simple things that clever people don't say; I find him the best of critics for that reason. Suddenly out comes the obvious thing that one has overlooked.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

6 November 1919
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

“A desire for children, I suppose; for Nessa's life; for the sense of flowers breaking all round me involuntarily. […] Years and years ago, after the Lytton affair, I said to myself, walking up the hill at Bayreuth, never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having; good advice I think. And then I went on to say to myself that one must like things for themselves; or rather, rid them of their bearing upon one's personal life. One must venture on to the things that exist independently of oneself. Now this is very hard for young women to do. Yet I got satisfaction from it. And now, married to L., I never have to make the effort. Perhaps I have been to happy for my soul's good? And does some of my discontent come from feeling that?”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

2 January 1923
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

“Margaret Ll. Davies writes that Janet is dying and will I write on her for The Times – a curious thought, rather: as if it mattered who wrote, or not. But this flooded me with the idea of Janet yesterday. I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Entry of 11 July 1937, in A Writer's Diary (1953)

“Here I come to one of the memoir writer’s difficulties — one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: ‘This is what happened’; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daughter of Leslie and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January 1882, descended from a great many people, some famous, others obscure; born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

"A Sketch of the Past" (written 1939, published posthumously)

“Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Monday 20 April 1925
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

“You are not listening to me. You are making phrases about Byron. And while you gesticulate, with your cloak, your cane, I am trying to expose a secret told to nobody yet; I am asking you (as I stand with my back to you) to take my life in your hands and tell me whether I am doomed always to cause repulsion in those I love?”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Bernard, section III
The Waves (1931)

“In brain and insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this, and so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always most wished from everyone.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Monday 21 December 1925
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

“At this Helen laughed outright. "Nonsense," she said. "You're not a Christian. You've never thought what you are.—And there are lots of other questions," she continued, "though perhaps we can't ask them yet." Although they had talked so freely they were all uncomfortably conscious that they really knew nothing about each other.
"The important questions," Hewet pondered, "the really interesting ones. I doubt that one ever does ask them."
Rachel, who was slow to accept the fact that only a very few things can be said even by people who know each other well, insisted on knowing what he meant.
"Whether we've ever been in love?" she enquired. "Is that the kind of question you mean?"”

Virginia Woolf book The Voyage Out

The Voyage Out (1915), Ch. XI

“In the past, the virtue of women's writing often lay in its divine spontaneity … But it was also, and much more often, chattering and garrulous … In future, granted time and books and a little space in the house for herself, literature will become for women, as for men, an art to be studied. Women's gift will be trained and strengthened. The novel will cease to be the dumping-ground for the personal emotions. It will become, more than at present, a work of art like any other, and its resources and its limitations will be explored.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

"Women and Fiction"
Granite and Rainbow (1958)

“Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

"Professions for Women"
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)

“We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life and speak the real language.”

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

"Montaigne" http://teaching.quotidiana.org/essays/Woolf_Montaigne.html <br class="br">The Common Reader (1925)