Virginia Woolf Quotes

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

“Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.”

“When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre”

“Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences.”

“But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.”

“Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.”

“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.”

“It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.”

“To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?”

“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”

“He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”

“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.”

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

“One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.”

“The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of-man.”

“The history of most women is hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence.”

“Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.”

“Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.”

“Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and the most common actions──a walk, a talk, solitude in one’s own orchard──can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind. Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only two finger’s-breadth from goodness.”

“You have been in every way all that anyone could be.... If anybody could have saved me it would have been you.”

“What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment.”

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

“All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.”

“Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having.”

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