Top 826 Quotes & Sayings by Virginia Woolf - Page 4

We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.

I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.

But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than any words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

But words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf.

Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married

Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely.

What does the brain matter compared with the heart?

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.

To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.

The compensation of growing old ... was simply this; that the passion remains as strong as ever, but one has gained -- at last! -- the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence -- the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.

All extremes are dangerous.

We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.

These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace.

I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.

Night had come—night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day.

A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.

Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes.

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination.

Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.

I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.

There'll be oceans of talk and emotions without end.

Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.

Tragedies come in the hungry hours.

It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole. This wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together

Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?

I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments.

Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.

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.

I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.

What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know ... I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.

I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms.

Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.

I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.

War is not women's history.

How can I express the darkness?

With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes -- one of the tragedies of married life.

We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments.

Now the writer, I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of ... reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.

I will go down with my colours flying.

Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.

If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?

Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.

Why have I so little control? It is the case of much waste and pain in my life.

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.

If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women.

The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.

To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away.

Well, we must wait for the future to show.

I am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold.

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.

Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.

I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.

Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.