Virginia Woolff Quotes

As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall. ~ Virginia Woolf

Then beneath the colour [of the paint] was the shape. She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. ~ Virginia Woolf

Five states - Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and North Carolina - have been identified by the EPA as contributing significantly to Rhode Island pollution. As of 2010, 284 tall smokestacks - stacks over 500 feet - were operating in the United States: needles injecting poison into the atmosphere. ~ Sheldon Whitehouse

Half one's notions of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one's own. ~ Virginia Woolf

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. ~ Virginia Woolf

As we rode slowly through the battle camp, the sounds and smells of war overwhelmed my senses: horses stamping and sweating in anticipation; men shouting; the steady rhythm of metal grinding on stone; leather snapping and buckling, and woo
d crackling in flame. The simmering energy of warriors as they eagerly awaited battle slithered through the camp like an invisible serpent ~ Virginia Chandler

Why then did she do it? She looked at the canvas, lightly scored with running lines. It would be hung in the servants' bedrooms. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa. What was the good of doing it then, and she heard some voice saying she couldn't paint, saying she couldn't create, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them. ~ Virginia Woolf

Our demand for good looks, expressed in the biting comments that ensue when public figures fall short of perfection, puts enormous pressures on these individuals and may screen out the otherwise qualified. If video killed the radio star, it may also be doing away with the homely politician. ~ Virginia Postrel

Although it is useful to specify the incongruities of the fox-hunting ban, the definitive word on the hunt is Oscar Wilde's: "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable". PAGE NELSON Charlottesville, Virginia ~ Anonymous

Yet he too obsessed me for years. Until I wrote it out, I would find my lips moving; I would be arguing with him; raging against him; saying to myself all that I never said to him. How deep they drove themselves into me, the things it was impossible to say aloud. ~ Virginia Woolf

The Lake Isle
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales not too greasy,
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn'd profession of writing,
where one needs one's brains all the time. ~ Ezra Pound

How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking? ~ Virginia Woolf

When you travel, the battered old suitcase only tells half the story... ~ Virginia Alison

The minute I forget to balance reality with the fantasy, I'm going back to Virginia. ~ Schuyler Fisk

I had always dreamed of living in Chapel Hill. When I was a college student at Hollins University in Virginia, I came down to Chapel Hill for summer school and just loved it. ~ Lee Smith

The Taliban outlawed wearing polish in the late 1990s, punishing some offenders by amputating a fingertip. Importing polish was banned only in July 2001, which suggests that women were still wearing painted nails within the safety of their homes. ~ Virginia Postrel

So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; ~ Virginia Woolf

Republican or Democrat, this nation's affluent urban and suburban classes understand their bread is buttered on the corporate side. The primary difference between the two parties is that the Republicans pretty much admit that they grasp and even endorse some of the nastiest facts of life in America. Republicans honestly tell the world: "Listen in on my phone calls, piss-test me until I'm blind, kill and eat all of my neighbors right in front of my eyes, but show me the money! Let me escape with every cent I can kick out of the suckers, the taxpayers, and anybody else I can get a headlock on, legally or otherwise." Democrats, in contrast, seem content to catalog the GOP's outrages against the Republic, showing proper indignation while laughing at episodes of The Daily Show. But they stand behind the American brand: imperialism. They "support our troops," though you will be hard put to find any of them who have served alongside them or who would send one of their own kids off to lose an eye or an arm in Iraq. They play the imperial game, maintain their credit ratings, and plan to keep the beach house and the retirement investments if it means sacrificing every damned Lynndie England in West Virginia. ~ Joe Bageant

My destiny has been that I remember and must weave together, must plait into one cable the many threads, the thin, the thick, the broken, the enduring of our long history, of our tumultuous and varied day. There is always more to be understood; a discord to be listened for; a falsity to be reprimanded. ~ Virginia Woolf

Scientifically speaking, the flesh was melted off the world. His body was macerated until only the nerve fibers were left. It was spread like a veil upon a rock. ~ Virginia Woolf

I love tremendous and sonorous words. ~ Virginia Woolf

And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! ~ Virginia Woolf

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. ~ Virginia Woolf

The People of Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression and that every. ~ Henry Adams

I went to The Miller School of Albemarle, just outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. As a kid, I really loved the movie 'Toy Soldiers' starring Sean Astin and Lou Gossett Jr., and when I found out they filmed that movie at the Miller School, I was excited to go there. ~ Scott Haze

Rise to the occassion which is life! ~ Virginia Euwer Wolff

I call myself a wordkeeper, or a keeper of words. I enjoy words and looking at them on all sides… Words are magnificent… They form rhythms of living in meaningful prose… It is the force of my desire, my wish to make myself understood, that powers these words. ~ Virginia Hamilton

Evans, Evans!" He Cried.
Mrs. Smith was talking aloud to himself, Agnes the servant girl cries to Mrs. Filmer in the kitchen. "Evans, Evans" he had said as she brought in the tray. She jumped, she did. She scuttled downstairs. ~ Virginia Woolf

Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in the room and through the waves came the voices of birds singing. ~ Virginia Woolf

The scenic vistas of North Carolina and Tennessee make you feel like you're looking at a work of art, but crossing through the rural countryside of southwest Virginia and caressing the tall grass with your fingertips, you feel like you're part of the painting. ~ Jennifer Pharr Davis

Hail, happiness, then, and after happiness, hail not those dreams which bloat the sharp image as spotted mirrors do the face in a country-inn parlour; dreams which splinter the whole and tear us asunder and wound us and split us apart in the night when we would sleep; but sleep, sleep, so deep that all shapes are ground to dust of infinite softness, water of dimness inscrutable, and there, folded, shrouded, like a mummy, like a moth, prone let us lie on the sand at the bottom of sleep. ~ Virginia Woolf

I have to admit that most of the time I read in the same way that I smoke and chew gum and jiggle my leg a lot. I read a lot, but at the same time I'm not a particularly good or diligent or discriminating reader. I go through maybe close to a thousand or more books a year, but a lot of times I'll only read bits and pieces of any one individual text. There are even certain works that are very important to me (Like Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, for example) that I probably haven't ever read all the way through from beginning to end, just certain passages over and over. I tend to read at stuff, rather that through it, if that makes any sense, and maybe there's something a little bit rodent-like about it, like a gerbil gnawing on woodchips in those, tiny, rapid obsessive bites. ~ Dan Chaon

I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say "This is it"? My depression is a harassed feeling. I'm looking: but that's not it - that's not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it? ~ Virginia Woolf

The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if they had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought
to call it by a prouder name than it deserved
had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until
you know the little tug
the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. ~ Virginia Woolf

One of the great jokes of life is that by the time you're old enough to recognize how little you know, all you can do is mop up the aftermath, dump it in a giant personal hazmat container and move on. ~ Virginia DeBerry

The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published. ~ Virginia Woolf