xy

@xy, member from Sept. 25, 2023

Favourite quotes (21448)

“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.”

Virginia Woolf book Jacob's Room

Source: Jacob's Room

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”

Virginia Woolf book Three Guineas

Source: Three Guineas (1938), Ch. 3, p. 109
Context: The outsider will say, "in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world." And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of England dropped into a child's ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm tree, by the splash of waves on a beach, or by English voices murmuring nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

The Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/tag/virginia-woolf/ traces the origin of such statements to The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (1932), where the diarist states:<br>We were sitting one morning two Summers ago, Ferenc Molnár, Dr. Rudolf Kommer and I, in the little garden of a coffee-house in the Austrian Tyrol. “Your writing?” we asked him. “How do you regard it?” Languidly he readjusted the inevitable monocle to his eye. “Like a whore,” he blandly ventured. “First, I did it for my own pleasure. Then I did it for the pleasure of my friends. And now — I do it for money.” <br class="br">Misattributed

“To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

“To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is… at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away…”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“I am rooted, but I flow.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer