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@xy, member from Sept. 25, 2023
“Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer
“It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.”
Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
“I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer
“I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.”
Virginia Woolf book The Voyage Out
Source: The Voyage Out
“Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.”
Virginia Woolf book Between the Acts
Source: Between the Acts
“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer
Variant: Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own
Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 3, pp. 43-44
Context: 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.
“He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.”
Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse
Source: To the Lighthouse
“Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.”
Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own
Source: A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
Context: What she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here there, she survived. Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.