Virginia Woolf Quotes

page 6

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“For nothing was simply one 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“When you are silent you are again beautiful.”

“Yes, I miss you, I miss you.”

“But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. 'About life, about death; about Mrs Ramsay”

“It was enemies one wanted, not friends.”

“Now, through my own infirmity I recover what he was to me: my opposite. Being naturally truthful, he did not see the point of these exaggerations, and was borne on by a natural sense of the fitting, was indeed a great master of the art of living so that he seems to have lived long, and to have spread calm round him, indifference one might almost say, certainly to his own advancement, save that he had also great compassion. […] We have no ceremonies, only private dirges and no conclusions, only violent sensations, each separate. Nothing that has been said meets our case. […] After a long lifetime, loosely, in a moment of revelation, I may lay hands on it, but now the idea breaks in my hand. Ideas break a thousand times for once that they globe themselves entire. […] I am yawning. I am glutted with sensations. I am exhausted with the strain and the long, long time — twenty-five minutes, half an hour — that I have held myself alone outside the machine.”

“The merest schoolgirl [school girl, ] when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer [try to] describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”

“I like the copious, shapeless, warm, not so very clever, but extremely easy and rather coarse aspect of things; the talk of men in clubs and public-houses; of miners half naked in drawers — the forthright, perfectly unassuming, and without end in view except dinner, love, money and getting along tolerably; that which is without great hopes, ideals, or anything of that kind; what is unassuming except to make a tolerably, good job of it. I like all that.”

“But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least in the nineteenth century, another characteristic which may be traced to the writer's sex. In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer's character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman's presence — of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights.”

“For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it.”

“For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.”

“Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.”

“We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life and speak the real language.”

“Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?”

“In the past, the virtue of women's writing often lay in its divine spontaneity … But it was also, and much more often, chattering and garrulous … In future, granted time and books and a little space in the house for herself, literature will become for women, as for men, an art to be studied. Women's gift will be trained and strengthened. The novel will cease to be the dumping-ground for the personal emotions. It will become, more than at present, a work of art like any other, and its resources and its limitations will be explored.”