Quotes by Virginia Woolf
(Page 4 of 5)

But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.

I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd.

But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.

I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

Even if fall she must, it was to lie on the earth and moulder sweetly into the roots of violets.

The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.

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

After that, how unbelievable death was! -- that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant.

But they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he , too, made that statement.

Like the pulse of a perfect heart, life struck straight through the streets.

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

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

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.

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.

The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness.

They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.

Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.

It was protective, on her side; sprang from a sense of being in league together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them (they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe), which led to this chivalry, this protective feeling which was much more on her side than Sally's.

My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.

Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you.

Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.

And even a tea party means apprehension, breakage.

The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.

Lazy and indifferent the heron returns; the sky veils her stars; then bares them.

Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.

All the months are crude experiments,
out of which the perfect September is made.

Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know.

The streets of London have their map, but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.

Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.

Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.

Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One's Mind about Another Person.

I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.

It's my choice, to choose how to live my life.

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.

Thinking is my fighting.

A light here required a shadow there.

Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.

These errand-boys and furtive and fugitive girls who, ignoring their doom, look in at shop windows? But I am aware of our ephemeral passage.

I exist only in the soles of my feet and in the tired muscles of my thighs. We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot remember.

Oh, yes, dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair.

I ask, if I shall never see you again and fix my eyes on that solidity, what form will our communication take? You have gone across the court, further and further, drawing finer and finer the thread between us. But you exist somewhere. Something of you remains.

I begin to be impatient of solitude -- to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me.

You have no one who has any sort of consideration for you. You have had patience and endurance till I am sick of the virtues, and what have they done for you? Half-killed you.

Shakespeare} the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then--our friends are not able to finish their stories.

As I write, there rises somewhere in my head that queer and very pleasant sense of something which I want to write; my own point of view.

I like reading my own writing. It seems to fit me closer than it did before.

I sleep among ravishing illusions and wake to their burden.

She seemed a compound of the autumn leaves and the winter sunshine .

Now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.

It gave to everything its exact measure of colour; to the sandhills their innumerable glitter, to the wild grasses their glancing green.

But what are stories? Toys I twist, bubbles I blow, one ring passing through another. And sometimes I begin to doubt if there are stories.

To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?

She did in her own heart infinitely prefer boobies to clever men who wrote dissertations.

And that is the time to read poetry ... when we are almost able to write it.

For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on top of St. Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet.

And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.

They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid-ocean, and see every detail of each others' faces, and hear whatever they chanced to say.

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes.

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

I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one's own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.

I want to write a novel about Silence, he said; the things people don't say.

I will go down with my colours flying.

I have had my vision.

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote.

It has the permanent quality of literature.

He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a sparkle of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type.

The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.' That will be useful.

She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness.

Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waves swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.

The winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason.

Dr. Holmes came again. Large, fresh coloured, handsome, flicking his boots, looking in the glass, he brushed it all aside-headaches, sleeplessness, fears, dreams-nerve symptoms and nothing more, he said.

Marvelous are the innocent.

He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.

I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun.

Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker's.

For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.

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.

My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.

I should never be able to fulfill what is,I understand, the first duty of a lecturer-to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever.

I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.

By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.