Virginia Woolf: Trending quotes

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Virginia Woolf: 764 quotes536 likes

“It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”

Variant: It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality
Source: The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

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

Virginia Woolf book Jacob's Room

Source: Jacob's Room

“Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder.
I sob, I sob.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

“He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

“There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.”

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

Source: The Common Reader

“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”

Virginia Woolf book Between the Acts

Source: Between the Acts

“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”

“An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw?”

Diary entry on James Joyce's Ulysses (16 August 1922), quoted in Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary (1953; 1965), p. 47

“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.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway (1925)

“While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 2

“Directly the mulberry tree begins to make you circle, break off. Pelt the tree with laughter.”

Virginia Woolf book Three Guineas

Source: Three Guineas (1938), Ch. 2, p. 80

“Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death… others through sheer inability to cross the street.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves (1931), p. 186

“But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets.”

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

"How It Strikes a Contemporary"
The Common Reader (1925)

“Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.”

26 July 1922
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

“Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it — the poets and novelists — can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does no exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma — a mirage.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 4

“But look — he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gesture one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves (1931), p. 30

“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Ch. 3 http://books.google.com/books?id=HSRFAAAAYAAJ&q=%22It+is+the+nature+of+the+artist+to+mind+excessively+what+is+said+about+him+Literature+is+strewn+with+the+wreckage+of+men+who+have+minded+beyond+reason+the+opinions+of+others%22&pg=PA98#v=onepage <br class="br">A Room of One's Own (1929)

“The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible.”

Essay "Lewis Carroll" (1939); reprinted in The Moment, and Other Essays (1948)

“Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.”

Virginia Woolf A Letter to a Young Poet

"A Letter to a Young Poet"
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)