Virginia Woolf: Trending quotes (page 11)

“What if I told you I’m incapable of tolerating my own heart?”

“… clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.”

“Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.”

“The moment was all; the moment was enough.”

“The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme -- thinking too much.”

“How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?”

“Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.”

“My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.”

“Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.”

“Thoughts are divine.”

“It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.”

“My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.”

“Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.”

“They can because they think they can.”

“I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.”

“And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.”

“Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.”