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Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Quotes

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Famous Virginia Woolf Quotes

“A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”

PeopleFeelingsLyingEmbraceCommunicateCorruptionReachingCentreImpossibilityDefianceRaptureFadedClosenessChatter
Book:Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition
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“This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.”

MadeSelfFormSpeakAnswersBreakSeaFieldsYouthWasteWaveConvictionDestroyedPhrasesColourOppositionGatesCriedEchoesRollingFistsLooking DownFinsSea LifeDeath Of A FriendDesertion
Book:Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
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“If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.”

PeopleIfsThinkingMeanCertainProcessAnswersDealsStrangeCurrentsScalesHopelessMelancholyLarge Scale
Author:Virginia Woolf
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“The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.”

ThinkingWayWritingFirstsCharacterReadingLiteratureMistakeBrainAirRocksExerciseDrawsOneselfGentleGood Literature
Author:Virginia Woolf
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“But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the teashop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him- he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily…he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then- that he could not feel.”

WorldFeelsReasonPerfectBrainExampleTasteTablesBillsAddFaultsWaiter
Book:Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition
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“For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.” — Virginia Woolf, The Waves”

ShouldImportantPainSoundSpaceBloodCryObjectsSolitudeWaveExtremesFleshPassingPassingsCracksLackingTwistedJointsVirginiaInterferenceWhitenessWoolf
Book:Selected Works of Virginia Woolf
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“The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the features from faces. People might walk through me. And what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar - forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel; our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.”

PeopleThinkingWayHas BeensTwoMomentsDreamBodyMightFacesFoundWalksSilenceProgressTreeParticularDrugCaughtBonesForestsNakedFeaturesBeastCoveredPassagesInchesShellsTrafficPavementWild Beasts
Book:Selected Works of Virginia Woolf
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“I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely.”

PeopleHeartPersonsEnoughMy OwnOur LivesTreeSorrowMoonMy FriendsLonelyWeakPhrasesPriestsImperfectFragmentsUnbrokenInspection
Book:The Waves
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“I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.”

MomentsBodySeemsEyePastRememberWishOpinionSpringPreservesNosesIndifferenceColourEmergenciesCrossingsMy Past
Book:The Waves
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