Top 100 Quotes About Woolf
#2. Could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world. It
Virginia Woolf
#3. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.
Virginia Woolf
#4. 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.
Virginia Woolf
#5. What has been seen cannot be unseen, what has been learned cannot be unknown. You cannot change the past, but you can learn from it. You can grow from it. You can be made stronger. You can use that strength to change your life, to change your future.
C.A. Woolf
#6. The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
Virginia Woolf
#7. He would look over the edge of the sofa down into the sea.
Virginia Woolf
#8. [Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
Virginia Woolf
#11. Freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art.
Virginia Woolf
#12. You can't think how I depend on you, and when you're not there the colour goes out of my life.
Virginia Woolf
#13. Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.
Virginia Woolf
#14. The summer is put away folded up in the drawer with other summers.
Virginia Woolf
#15. Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.
Virginia Woolf
#17. Leonard Woolf in a letter to Lytton Strachey said he hated John Maynard Keynes "for his crass stupidity and hideous face".
Leonard Woolf
#18. So, when there is a strife of tongues, at some meeting, the chairman, to obtain unity, suggests that every one shall speak in French. Perhaps it is bad French; French may not contain the words that express the speaker's thoughts; nevertheless speaking French imposes some order, some uniformity.
Virginia Woolf
#19. Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.
Virginia Woolf
#21. But who, save the nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with hands to the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see things thus in skeleton outline, bare of flesh?
Virginia Woolf
#22. But when she looked at Prue tonight, she saw this was not now quite true of her. She was just beginning, just moving, just descending.
Virginia Woolf
#23. If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
Alan Bennett
#24. Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.
Virginia Woolf
#25. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.
Virginia Woolf
#26. My mind is so impatient, so quick, in some ways so desperate.
Virginia Woolf
#27. It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.
Virginia Woolf
#28. Roses," she thought sardonically, "All trash, m'dear.
Virginia Woolf
#29. It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.
Virginia Woolf
#30. There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.
Virginia Woolf
#31. They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love
Virginia Woolf
#32. It is strange that we, who are capable of so much suffering, should inflict so much suffering.
Virginia Woolf
#33. It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the dark paths of the mind and enter the past, to visit books, to brush aside their branches and break off some fruit.
Virginia Woolf
#34. As for himself, when he went to go to a party, as one was sometimes obliged to, from a wish not to give offence, he walked into the middle of the room, said 'Ha! Ha!' as loud as ever he could, considered he had done his duty, and went home.
Virginia Woolf
#35. Here am I shedding one of my life-skins and all they will say is, 'Bernard is spending ten days in Rome'.
Virginia Woolf
#36. But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.
Virginia Woolf
#37. I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.
Virginia Woolf
#38. About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.
Virginia Woolf
#39. One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man
Virginia Woolf
#40. Clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.
Virginia Woolf
#41. Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.
Virginia Woolf
#42. This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it.
Virginia Woolf
#43. The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme
thinking too much.
Virginia Woolf
#44. 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.
Virginia Woolf
#45. Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.
Virginia Woolf
#46. Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough.
Virginia Woolf
#47. 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
#48. The mind is certainly a very mysterious organ, I reflected, drawing my head in from the window, about which nothing whatever is known, though we depend upon it so completely.
Virginia Woolf
#49. Men felt a chill in their hearts; a damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth,one subterfuge was tried after anothersentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics.
Virginia Woolf
#50. It's the writing, not the being read, that excites me. Joy is in the doing.
Virginia Woolf
#51. Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.
Virginia Woolf
#52. When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook - a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
Virginia Woolf
#53. That silence is more profound after noise still wants the confirmation of science. But that loneliness is more apparent directly after one has been made love to, many women would take their oath.
Virginia Woolf
#54. Woolf disagrees, saying of the home, "For there we sit surrounded by objects which enforce the memories of our own experience.
Rebecca Solnit
#55. I almost envied him the possession of this modest and clear flame.
Virginia Woolf
#56. 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
#57. The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long life seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed.
..
Virginia Woolf
#58. The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.
Virginia Woolf
#59. These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.
Virginia Woolf
#60. 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.
Virginia Woolf
#61. It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
Virginia Woolf
#62. It's funny, isn't it," Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too.
Kate Atkinson
#63. I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.
Lalla Ward
#64. My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.
Virginia Woolf
#65. Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control.
Virginia Woolf
#66. Sir William said he never spoke of 'madness'; he called it not having a sense of proportion.
Virginia Woolf
#67. Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes? when, thought Clarissa, that's the miracle, that's the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of drawers to dressing-table.
Virginia Woolf
#68. What amulet is there against this disaster? What face can I summon to lay cool upon this heat?
Virginia Woolf
#69. In the glass she wore an expression of tense melancholy, for she had come to the depressing conclusion, since the arrival of the Dalloways, that her face was not the face she wanted, and in all probability never would be.
Virginia Woolf
#71. They are very large in effect, these painters; very little self-conscious; they have smooth broad spaces in their minds where I am all prickles & promontories.
Virginia Woolf
#72. 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
#73. Was she not forgetting again how strongly she influenced people?
Virginia Woolf
#74. The proper stuff of fiction' does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.
Virginia Woolf
#75. And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? 'Confound it all.' he cried, 'why say Bedfellow when one's already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means and save it?
Virginia Woolf
#76. It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.
Virginia Woolf
#77. It would be a comfort, she felt, to lean; to sit down; yes, to lie down; never, never, never to get up again.
Virginia Woolf
#78. Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
Virginia Woolf
#79. I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
Virginia Woolf
#80. 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.
Virginia Woolf
#81. 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' is, to my mind, a work of perfect genius.
Amity Gaige
#82. Happily, at forty-six I still feel as experimental and on the verge of getting at the truth as ever.
Virginia Woolf
#83. Under the decent veil of print one can indulge one's egoism to the full.
Virginia Woolf
#84. There never will be a book, because some one else has written it for him," said Mr. Pepper with considerable acidity. "That's what comes of putting things off, and collecting fossils, and sticking Norman arches on one's pigsties.
Virginia Woolf
#86. For love ... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together
Virginia Woolf
#87. Deffand fell in love with him, and thought that at her age she could
Virginia Woolf
#88. There is a coherence in things, a stability; something ... is immune from change and shines out ... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.
Virginia Woolf
#89. Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.
Virginia Woolf
#92. Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
Virginia Woolf
#93. Let us turn over the pages, and I will add, for your amusement, a comment in the margin.
Virginia Woolf
#94. Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.
Edith Sitwell
#95. I am clouded and bruised with the print of minds and faces and things so subtle that they have smell, colour, texture, substance, but no name.
Virginia Woolf
#97. For I hear music, they were saying. Music wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken. Look and listen.
Virginia Woolf
#98. But the Daily Mail isn't to be trusted," Jacob said to himself, looking about for something else to read.
Virginia Woolf
#99. To be engaged to marry some one with whom you are not in love is an inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is only a traveler's story brought from the heart of deep forests and told so rarely that wise people doubt whether the story can be true.
Virginia Woolf
#100. What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included.
Virginia Woolf
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