Virginia Woolf Quotes

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“To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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?”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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”

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

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

“She read everything.”

“Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.”

“And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.”

“I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.”

“They can because they think they can.”

“Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.”

“My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.”

“But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.”

“Thoughts are divine.”

“Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.”

“My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.”

“Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.”

“How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?”

“The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme -- thinking too much.”

“The moment was all; the moment was enough.”

“Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.”

“… clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.”

“What if I told you I’m incapable of tolerating my own heart?”

“… But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful…”

“Whenever you see a board up with "Trespassers will be prosecuted," trespass at once.”

“A million candles burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one”

“At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.”

“But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them.”

“If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?”

“Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.”

“Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.”

“So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball”