Virginia Woolf Quotes

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Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Virginia Woolf
About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

Virginia Woolf
She had done the usual trick – been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr Bankes) were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere.

Virginia Woolf
They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

Virginia Woolf
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins—of happiness and unhappiness.

Virginia Woolf
So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.

Virginia Woolf
As a creator of character his peculiarity is that he creates wherever his eyes rest... With such a power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire.

Virginia Woolf
I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.

Virginia Woolf
There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow or other, by dint of labor or bounty of nature, or both combined, the essay must be pure — pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.

Virginia Woolf
To know whom to write for is to know how to write.

Virginia Woolf
Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!

Virginia Woolf
But words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf.

Virginia Woolf
Jealousy... survives every other passion of mankind...

Virginia Woolf
Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?

Virginia Woolf
When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.

Virginia Woolf
It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

Virginia Woolf
Old emotions like old families have intermarried and have many connections.

Virginia Woolf
You would get longer livelier and more frequent letters from me, if it weren't for the Christian religion. How that bell tolling at the end of the garden, dum dum, dum dum, annoys me! Why is Christianity so insistent and so sad?

Virginia Woolf
Travelers are much at the mercy of phrases... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains.

Virginia Woolf
A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.

Virginia Woolf
I read the book of Job last night. I don't think God comes well out of it.

Virginia Woolf
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees
and changing leaves.

Virginia Woolf
When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.

Virginia Woolf
The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.

Virginia Woolf
The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case [the woman writer's] not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What's the good of your writing?

Virginia Woolf
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...

Virginia Woolf
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

Virginia Woolf
Even Morgan seems to me to be based on some hidden rock. Talking of Proust and Lawrence he said he'd prefer to be Lawrence; but much rather would be himself. He is aloof, serene, a snob, he says, reading masterpieces only.

Virginia Woolf
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

Virginia Woolf
I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk [sic] treasure

Virginia Woolf