Virginia Woolf Quotes

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.”

“What a lark! What a plunge!”

“How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world.”

“In marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house.”

“The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.”

“Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.”

“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?”

“Oh, I am in love with life!”

“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

“The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.”

“We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.”

“That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.”

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

“I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.”

“It is no use trying to sum people up.”

“For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.”

“She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.”

“Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”

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

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

“Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure”

“If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy.”

“Yes, yes, I'm coming. Right up the top of the house. One moment I'll linger. How the mud goes round in the mind-what a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts itself, and a gain through the eyes one sees clear and still, and there comes to the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those one nods to, the one never meets again.”

“Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.”

“Alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know”

“My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.”

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

“Jealousy ... survives every other passion of mankind.”

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

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”

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

“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.”

“Speech is an old torn net, through which the fish escape as one casts it over them.”

“Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.”

“Life would split apart without letters.”

“People only become writers if they can't find the one book they've always wanted to read.”

“Criticism? An artist wants praise. Praise.”

“No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes”

“Oh and I thought, as i was dressing, how interesting it would be to describe the approach of age, and the gradual coming of death. As people describe love. To note every symptom of failure: but why failure? To treat age as an experience that is different from the others; and to detect every one of the gradual stages towards death which is a tremendous experience, an not as unconscious, at least in its approaches, as death is.”

“I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”

“It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.”

“Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall.”

“Thoughts without words… Can that be?”

“fishing teaches a stern morality; inculcates a remorseless honesty.”

“What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself- a voice answering a voice.”

“By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”

“I prefer men to cauliflowers”

“Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours.”

“All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side.”