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Favourite quotes (21448)

“Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Sometimes ascribed to Virginia Woolf, but it appeared as early as 1854 in Anna Jameson's A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories and Fancies, where it is ascribed to William Wordsworth.
Misattributed

“For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Part II, Ch. 3
To the Lighthouse (1927)

“For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Essay "Lewis Carroll" (1939)

“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 (1882–1941) English writer

"Women and Fiction"
Granite and Rainbow (1958)

“I like the copious, shapeless, warm, not so very clever, but extremely easy and rather coarse aspect of things; the talk of men in clubs and public-houses; of miners half naked in drawers — the forthright, perfectly unassuming, and without end in view except dinner, love, money and getting along tolerably; that which is without great hopes, ideals, or anything of that kind; what is unassuming except to make a tolerably, good job of it. I like all that.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves (1931), p. 246

“The merest schoolgirl [school girl, ] when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer [try to] describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway (1925)

“Now, through my own infirmity I recover what he was to me: my opposite. Being naturally truthful, he did not see the point of these exaggerations, and was borne on by a natural sense of the fitting, was indeed a great master of the art of living so that he seems to have lived long, and to have spread calm round him, indifference one might almost say, certainly to his own advancement, save that he had also great compassion. […] We have no ceremonies, only private dirges and no conclusions, only violent sensations, each separate. Nothing that has been said meets our case. […] After a long lifetime, loosely, in a moment of revelation, I may lay hands on it, but now the idea breaks in my hand. Ideas break a thousand times for once that they globe themselves entire. […] I am yawning. I am glutted with sensations. I am exhausted with the strain and the long, long time — twenty-five minutes, half an hour — that I have held myself alone outside the machine.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Bernard on Percival, section V
The Waves (1931)

“It was enemies one wanted, not friends.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway (1925)

“But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. 'About life, about death; about Mrs Ramsay”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody.
Part III, Ch. 5
To the Lighthouse (1927)

“Yes, I miss you, I miss you.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“When you are silent you are again beautiful.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

The Waves

“Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

“There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“… a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

“I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power, as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs Dalloway

“There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death…”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again…”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

“… I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Source: A Writer's Diary