Virginia Woolf: Trending quotes (page 7)

“Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the center which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”

“You’re the only person I’ve ever met who seems to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say a thing.”

“Night had come—night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day.”

“For nothing was simply one thing.”

“For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said.”

“The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.”

“Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent.”

“Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.”

“But the close withdrew: the hand softened. It was over-- the moment.”

“I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.”

“O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!”

“We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.”

“It is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people… Think of things in themselves.”

“I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.”

“One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.”

“For we think back through our mothers if we are women.”

“Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.”

“I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart.”

“She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.”