Virginia Woolf: Trending quotes (page 6)

“When you are silent you are again beautiful.”

“Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping.”

“There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.”

“… a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.”

“I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.”

“And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power, as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.”

“There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death…”

“As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.”

“so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again…”

“… I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.”

“Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.”

“It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.”

“Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.”

“what she loved: life, London, this moment of June.”

“Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame”

“For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn…”

“When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre”

“Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul.”

“Chastity… has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.”