Virginia Woolf Quotes

“She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was however; there she was.”

“I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases.”

“The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.”

“The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

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

“A light here required a shadow there.”

“Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.”

“Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.”

“In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.”

“The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.”

“You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight.”

“Thus Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility; and Mr. Hemingway, but much less violently, follows suit.”

“Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.”

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

“Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.”

“It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.”

“Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.”

“Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.”

“It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man.”

“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”

“what she loved: life, London, this moment of june.”

“And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.”

“The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman.”

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

“But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.”