Top 826 Quotes & Sayings by Virginia Woolf - Page 11

Theories then are dangerous things.

Travelers are much at the mercy of phrases ... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains.

No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes

For women live much more in the past...they attach themselves to places.

What a labour writing is ... making one sentence do the work of a page; that's what I call hard work.

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?

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

For there is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light.

I was lying in bed this morning and saying to myself, 'the remarkable thing about Ethel is her stupendous self-satisfaction' when in came your letter to confirm this profound psychological observation. How delighted I was!

If this were the time or the place to uphold a paradox, I am half inclined to state that Norfolk is one of the most beautiful of counties.

But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality has no such simple effect upon the mind of man.

to teach without zest is a crime.

I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.

But I think I’m coloured by my own wishes, & experimental mood.

scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman's rifle; the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you, not by us. Obviously there is for you some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting which we have never felt or enjoyed.

I have had my vision.

To know whom to write for is to know how to write.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze.

... the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depend.

There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in.

It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?... What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

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.

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.

women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. ... Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.

Life's bare as a bone.

I do think all good and evil comes from words. I have to tune myself into a good temper with something musical, and I run to a book as a child to its mother.

To love makes one solitary.

The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it.

I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement.

The large shiny black forehead of the first whale was no more than two yards from us when it sank beneath the surface of the water, then we saw the huge blue-black bulk glide quietly under the raft right beneath our feet. It lay there for some time, dark and motionless, and we held our breath as we looked down on the gigantic curved back of a mammal a good deal longer than the raft.

Happily, at forty-six I still feel as experimental and on the verge of getting at the truth as ever.

He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship -- it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out.

Books should stand on their own feet ... If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady.

... I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.

Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.

Nothing is stronger than the position of the dead among the living.

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?

What a comfort is friendship in this world.

Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any.

Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.

It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of woman's life is that.

I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.

The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process.

Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.

Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. More than anything... it calls for confidence in oneself...And how can we generate this imponderable quality most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.

The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls unrecorded.

Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?

For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say 'good to eat' when they mean 'beautiful' and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.

Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect ... He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes ... He is without doubt the prince of his profession.

There are no teachers, saints, prophets, good people, but the artists.

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.

Does Nature supplement what man advanced? Or does she complete what he began?

Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.

writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

What could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands.

I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.

One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.