Virginia Woolf Quotes

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So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.

Virginia Woolf
Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. 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.

Virginia Woolf
The profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait — whether to fish with worms or not.

Virginia Woolf
I want the concentration and the romance, and the words all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

Virginia Woolf
A million candles burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one.

Virginia Woolf
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

Virginia Woolf
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.

Virginia Woolf
The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.

Virginia Woolf
The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.

Virginia Woolf
I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.

Virginia Woolf
Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.

Virginia Woolf
Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

Virginia Woolf
I am amused at my relations with her: left so ardent in January – and now what? Also I like her presence and her beauty. Am I in love with her? But what is love? Her being 'in love' with me, excites and flatters; and interests. What is this 'love'?

Virginia Woolf
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

Virginia Woolf
Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.

Virginia Woolf
Vague as all good definitions are, a good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.

Virginia Woolf
Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any.

Virginia Woolf
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.

Virginia Woolf
As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

Virginia Woolf
These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

Virginia Woolf
She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was however; there she was.

Virginia Woolf
There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.

Virginia Woolf
Letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps - who knows? - we might talk by the way.

Virginia Woolf
Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.

Virginia Woolf
The transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depend.

Virginia Woolf
I was lying in bed this morning and saying to myself, 'the remarkable thing about Ethel is her stupendous self-satisfaction' when in came your letter to confirm this profound psychological observation. How delighted I was!

Virginia Woolf
Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine.... It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.

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
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