Virginia Woolf Quotes

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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.

Virginia Woolf
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Virginia Woolf
Happily, at forty-six I still feel as experimental and on the verge of getting at the truth as ever.

Virginia Woolf
Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes.

Virginia Woolf
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Virginia Woolf
I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.

Virginia Woolf
We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie asleep.

Virginia Woolf
The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is through our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life…

Virginia Woolf
I must try to set aside half an hour in some part of my day, and consecrate it to diary writing. Give it a name and a place, and then perhaps, such is the human mind, I shall come to think it a duty, and disregard other duties for it.

Virginia Woolf
But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

Virginia Woolf
Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that

Virginia Woolf
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Virginia Woolf
All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.

Virginia Woolf
These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.

Virginia Woolf
War is a man's game... the killing machine has a gender and it is male.

Virginia Woolf
And then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart.

Virginia Woolf
Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words.

Virginia Woolf
My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.

Virginia Woolf
As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

Virginia Woolf
To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the think 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.

Virginia Woolf
Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.

Virginia Woolf
I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.

Virginia Woolf
Fishing teaches a stern morality; inculcates a remorseless honesty.

Virginia Woolf
To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination.

Virginia Woolf
To write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.

Virginia Woolf
The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property; (2) that she was a woman which amounts to much the same thing …

Virginia Woolf
Tell me", he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how to speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depth of the sea instead?

Virginia Woolf
Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

Virginia Woolf
But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them.

Virginia Woolf
Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.

Virginia Woolf