Virginia Woolf Quotes

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Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.

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

Virginia Woolf
It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance Whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine.

Virginia Woolf
A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.

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
Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.

Virginia Woolf
I want some one to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarreling and reconciliation I need privacy—to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.

Virginia Woolf
Vain trifles as they seem, clothes change our view of the world and the world's view of us.

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
Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.

Virginia Woolf
The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.

Virginia Woolf
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.

Virginia Woolf
It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams

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

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
It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.

Virginia Woolf
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

Virginia Woolf
I will achieve in my life - Heaven grant that it be not long - some gigantic amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to me. Out of my suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will enter.

Virginia Woolf
But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with the lady's-maid that high birth is a form of congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in one of those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

Virginia Woolf
How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?

Virginia Woolf