Virginia Woolf Quotes

page 5

“The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness”

“I am not one and simple, but complex and many.”

“Why must they grow up and lose it all?”

“Well, we must wait for the future to show.”

“If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?”

“Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.”

“But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.”

“Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.”

“I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.”

“Her eyes are pure stars, and her fingers, if they touch you, freeze you to the bone.”

“Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.”

“I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement…”

“I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely.”

“For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.”

“If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women…”

“Marvelous are the innocent.”

“For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.”

“Nothing has really happened unless it's been described [in words].”

“Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these – ‘Chloe liked Olivia…’ 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.”

“it is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams”

“One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.”

“madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!" "I'm dead, sir!" she replied. A few minutes later, they became engaged.”

“Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.”

“But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.”

“Language is wine upon the lips.”

“I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.”

“Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.”

“I am drowning, my dear, in seas of fire.”

“When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.”

“It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.”

“She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust.”

“Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And
I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often
not. Life is a dream surely.”

“I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices”

“They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.”

“for women live much more in the past… they attach themselves to places;”

“No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes”

“Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?”

“One must love everything.”

“Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then — our friends are not able to finish their stories.”

“There are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, and if one can neithre feel nor think, where's one?”

“In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.”

“to teach without zest is a crime.”

“Would there be trees if we didn't see them?”

“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.”

“Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!”

“How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?”

“Oh, I am in love with life!”

“We're all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person's opinion of another person? One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn't know”

“After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.”