Virginia Woolf: Citations en anglais

Virginia Woolf était femme de lettres britannique. Citations en anglais.
Virginia Woolf: 443 citations0 J'aime

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Virginia Woolf

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

Help us translate this quote

Virginia Woolf livre Les Vagues

Source: The Waves

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Virginia Woolf livre Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs Dalloway

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

Help us translate this quote

Virginia Woolf livre A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

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

Help us translate this quote

Virginia Woolf

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Virginia Woolf livre A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

“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”

Help us translate this quote

Virginia Woolf livre To the Lighthouse

no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody.
Part III, Ch. 5
To the Lighthouse (1927)

“It was enemies one wanted, not friends.”

Help us translate this quote

Virginia Woolf livre Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway (1925)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Virginia Woolf livre Les Vagues

Bernard on Percival, section V
The Waves (1931)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Virginia Woolf livre Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway (1925)

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Virginia Woolf livre Les Vagues

Source: The Waves (1931), p. 246

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Virginia Woolf

"Women and Fiction"
Granite and Rainbow (1958)

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

Help us translate this quote

Virginia Woolf

Essay "Lewis Carroll" (1939)

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

Help us translate this quote

Virginia Woolf livre To the Lighthouse

Part II, Ch. 3
To the Lighthouse (1927)

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

Help us translate this quote

Virginia Woolf

Sometimes ascribed to Virginia Woolf, but it appeared as early as 1854 in Anna Jameson's A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories and Fancies, where it is ascribed to William Wordsworth.
Misattributed

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

&quot;Montaigne&quot; http://teaching.quotidiana.org/essays/Woolf_Montaigne.html <br class="br">The Common Reader (1925)

“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?”

Help us translate this quote

Virginia Woolf

"Professions for Women"
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)