xy

@xy, member from Sept. 25, 2023

Favourite quotes (21448)

“O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“It is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people… Think of things in themselves.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

“I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Source: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume One: 1915-1919

“One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Source: The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Six, 1936-1941

“For we think back through our mothers if we are women.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

“I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

“Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

“We're all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person's opinion of another person? One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn't know”

Virginia Woolf book The Voyage Out

Source: The Voyage Out

“Oh, I am in love with life!”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

“Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Variant: It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.... Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.
Source: A Room of One's Own

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

Virginia Woolf book The Years

Source: The Years

“At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

“to teach without zest is a crime.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.”

Virginia Woolf book Jacob's Room

Source: Jacob's Room