Virginia Woolf Quotes
“Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you.”
Source: Selected Diaries
“Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.”
Source: To the Lighthouse
“… she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
Source: A Room of One's Own
“For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”
Source: A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas
“I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.”
Source: The Waves
“It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.”
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
“The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.”
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
“It is no use trying to sum people up.”
Source: Jacob's Room
Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 2
“When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.”
Source: Jacob's Room
Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 3
Context: No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party — for what do they battle except their own prestige?
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
Context: But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quiet continuously a sense of their existence and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?
An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.
All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was! — that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.
“Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
“I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.”
Source: Jacob's Room
“Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having.”
Source: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two: 1920-1924
“Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.”
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
“Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.”
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
“Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.”
Source: A Room of One's Own
Source: A Room of One's Own
“Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.”
Source: To the Lighthouse
"Modern Fiction"
The Common Reader (1925)
Context: Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
“Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.”
Source: A Room of One's Own
Part I, Ch. 9
Source: To the Lighthouse (1927)
Context: Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscription on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay's knee.
