Virgina Woolf Quotes

Every secret of a writers soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works - Virginia Woolf ~ Tracie Podger

The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks - so it sounded. ~ 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

What she loved: life, London, this moment of June. ~ Virginia Woolf

It was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many. ~ Virginia Woolf

All the time she writing the world had continued. ~ Virginia Woolf

The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. ~ Virginia Woolf

But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. ~ Virginia Woolf

Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence. ~ Virginia Woolf

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. ~ Virginia Woolf

She felt, with her hand on the nursery door, that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically (the feeling was one of relief and happiness) it was all one stream ... ~ Virginia Woolf

Though the wind is rough and blowing in their faces, those girls there, striding hand in hand, shouting out a song, seem to feel neither cold nor shame. They are hatless. They triumph. ~ Virginia Woolf

Distant views seemed to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest. ~ Virginia Woolf

For in marriage a little licence,a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him. ~ Virginia Woolf

The summer is put away folded up in the drawer with other summers. ~ Virginia Woolf

At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials. ~ Virginia Woolf

You can't think how I depend on you, and when you're not there the colour goes out of my life. ~ Virginia Woolf

Yes yes yes I do like you. I am afraid to write the stronger word. ~ Virginia Woolf

I am ... persuaded that Woolf was right, that every novel has a characteristic rhythm. And that if the writer hasn't listened for that rhythm and followed it, the sentences will be lame, the characters will be puppets, the story will be false. And if the writer can hold to that rhythm, the book will have some beauty. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Month by month things are losing their hardness; even my body now lets the light through; my spine is soft like wax near the flame of the candle. I dream; I dream. ~ Virginia Woolf

Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end. ~ Virginia Woolf

Insofar as I think about postmodernism at all, and it doesn't exactly keep me awake at nights, I think of it as something that happens to one, not a style one affects. We're postmoderns because we're not modernists. The modernist writers-Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Stevens, Yeats, Woolf, Williams-spoke with a kind of vatic authority: they were really the last of the Romantics, for whom authorship itself was like being a solitary prophet in the wasteland. ~ Jonathan Raban

I skim through our notebook, thick with words, and then through our Facebook messages - so many now - and then I write a new one, quoting Virginia Woolf: Let us wander whirling to the gilt chairs. ... Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here ... ? ~ Jennifer Niven

When two people have been married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other's bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness. ~ Virginia Woolf

It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds ~ Virginia Woolf

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh ... Robert Schumann has been mentioned ... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath ... some of them with rather grim ends. ~ Stephen Fry

He awoke on the desert gliding at seventyfive, to see a single great headlight topping a rise not far off and bearing toward him. Vaguely he remembered being under the eye of the law most of the night, pursued by cops in white cars like their uniforms, so he slowed her to an unreasonable speed and crept on with two restless wheels in the sand. Ahead of him the light veered off to the right, out of disappointment or what, and it appeared to rise quickly into the air. He soon saw why: it was the moon being chased by the sun. ~ Douglas Woolf

Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man. ~ Leonard Woolf

Every woman, even the most respectable, had roses blooming under glass; lips cut with a knife; curls of Indian ink; there was design, art, everywhere; a change of some sort had undoubtedly taken place. ~ Virginia Woolf

There is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women. There are no yard measures neatly divided into the fractions of an inch that one can lay against the qualities of a good mother or the devotion of a daughter or fidelity of a sister or the capacity of a housekeeper. ~ Virginia Woolf

Theodore Finch leans against an SUV, hands in pockets, like he has all the time in the world and he expects me. I think of the Virginia Woolf lines, the ones from The Waves: Pale, with dark hair, the one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here. ~ Jennifer Niven

I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded. ~ Virginia Woolf

Although Carroll is now something of an iconic figure for psychedelic drug users, there is only the tiniest shred of evidence that he ever took laudanum, morphine, cocaine, magic mushrooms or indeed that he sampled any mind-altering drugs at all. ~ Jenny Woolf

Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours. ~ Virginia Woolf

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin. ~ Virginia Woolf

And then she looked up and saw Flush. Something unusual in his look must have struck her. She paused. She laid down her pen. Once he had roused her with a kiss, and she thought that he was Pan. He had eaten chicken and rice pudding soaked in cream. He had given up the sunshine for her sake. She called him to her and said she forgave him. ~ Virginia Woolf

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

For you will find, as women have found through the ages, that changing the world requires a lot of free time. Requires a lot of mobility. Requires money, and, as Virginia Woolf put it so well, "a room of one's own," preferably one with a key and a lock. Which means that women must be prepared to think for themselves, which means, undoubtedly, trouble with boyfriends, lovers, and husbands, which means all kinds of heartache and misery, and times when you will wonder if independence, freedom of thought, or your own work is worth it all. We must believe that it is. For the world is not good enough; we must make it better. ~ Alice Walker

Forgetfulness in people might wound, their ingratitude corrode, but this voice, pouring endlessly, year in year out, would take whatever it might be; this vow; this van; this life; this procession, would wrap them all about and carry them on, as in the rough stream of a glacier the ice holds a splinter of bone, a blue petal, some oak trees, and rolls them on. ~ Virginia Woolf