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Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Quotes

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Famous Virginia Woolf Quotes

“Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain-top is covered in mist, knows that he must lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole upon him, paling the colour of his eyes, giving him, even in the two minutes of his turn on the terrace, the bleached look of withered old age. Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R.”

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Book:To the Lighthouse
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“It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?... What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.”

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Book:Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)
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“No one would think of bringing a dog into church. For though a dog is all very well on a gravel path, and shows no disrespect to flowers, the way he wanders down an aisle, looking, lifting a paw, and approaching a pillar with a purpose that makes the blood run cold with horror ... a dog destroys the service completely.”

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Book:Jacob's Room
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“I am obsessed at nights with the idea of my own worthlessness, and if it were only to turn a light on to save my life I think I would not do it. These are the last footprints of a headache I suppose. Do you ever feel that? - like an old weed in a stream. What do you feel, lying in bed?”

IfsThinkingFeelsIdeasLightLastsLyingNightTurnsMy OwnBedObsessedStreamsWeedFootprintHeadacheWorthlessness
Book:The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1929-1931
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“Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”

PeopleThinkingWayYearsBodyVoiceNaturalCommonBehindsWrittenPoetBirthMassForgottenTongueOutcomesSolitaryMasterpieceJaneAustenSavageryTamedEliotForerunnersBronteChaucerMarlowe
Book:A Room of One's Own
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“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

IfsThinkingLoveWellsSleepFoodHealthEatingCookingCulinaryNutritionChefDessertCuisineDiningGood FoodFood LoveFood And DrinkHealthy EatingEating FoodCookeryFood And EatingGreat FoodHealth FoodItalian FoodFresh FoodDelicious FoodEating HealthyCooking And EatingItalian CookingGood SleepHome CookingSleep WellYummyDeep SleepFavorite FoodsBest FoodCooking LoveGourmet FoodEating WellI Love FoodHunger For FoodGood EatingChefs CookingCooking And LoveSweets And DessertsCulinary LoveFood And LoveEating Healthy FoodDining TableEating GoodFood CultureDine InPerfect FoodSharing FoodGood Eats
Author:Virginia Woolf
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“Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.”

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Author:Virginia Woolf
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“For now she need not think of anybody. She coud be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.”

ThinkingNeedsWellsSelfFeltDarknessAdventureSilentOneselfCoreInvisibleAttachmentShedVocalWedgesSolemnity
Book:To the Lighthouse
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“That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.”

ThinkingWayGivingHumansLooksMeanWholeCharacterSeemsComedyPoetTasksTragedyRelationMysteriousHuman LifeNovelistsLengthFragmentsAffinitySpun
Book:A Letter to a Young Poet
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“To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bend her head as if to let her pelt f jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked.”

PeopleIfsThinkingHumansFeelingsWaterHorriblePursueDirtyConsiderationVeilsDecencyAstonishingOutrageCivilisationBlindedHailDazedConsideration For OthersReplyingDirty Water
Author:Virginia Woolf
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“Now to sum it up,' said Bernard. 'Now to explain to you the meaning of my life. Since we do not know each other (though I met you once I think, on board a ship going to Africa), we can talk freely. The illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it were possible, I would hand it you entire. I would break it off as one breaks off a bunch of grapes. I would say, "Take it. This is my life.”

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Book:The Waves
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“I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.”

ThinkingWantHardFactsOne ThingObstaclesDeeperSurfaceChairsSlipsHostilityInterrupted
Book:The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction
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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.”

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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.”

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Author: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.”

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Book:Selected Works of Virginia Woolf
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“Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotchpotch of impulses, our perpetual miracle - for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death; let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.”

ThinkingWorldDoeSoulMatterWonderMovementEssenceMiracleCaringConfusionFantasticImpulseRepeatsFancyNonsenseConformityPerpetualEvery SecondFlingRigidityNothing MattersCauldrons
Book:The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925-1928
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