Virginia Woolf Quotes

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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
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
Fishing teaches a stern morality; inculcates a remorseless honesty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia Woolf
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.

Virginia Woolf
The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.

Virginia Woolf
I'm not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.

Virginia Woolf
But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.

Virginia Woolf
Peace was the third emotion. Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life.

Virginia Woolf
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Virginia Woolf
The root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.

Virginia Woolf
For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

Virginia Woolf
Oh dear, why does Lydia always come in — and why must she beg me to believe that she thinks seriously every day of her life, as she says? when her brain is a cage of canaries?

Virginia Woolf
There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.

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
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
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