Virginia Woolf: Trending quotes (page 12)

“anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.”

“The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.”

“some we know to be dead even though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through all the forms of life; other are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six”

“Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?”

“Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.”

“These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.”

“Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.”

“Still, life had a way of adding day to day”

“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”

“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”

“Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?”

“The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.”

“One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.”

“I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.”

“A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.”

“It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”

“Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.”

“We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe
that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie
asleep.”

“For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.”