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Virginia Woolf

139 quotes

“On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look twice at, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; & then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Diary entry (9 January 1915), quoted in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume I: 1915–1919, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (1977), p. 13
“An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw?”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Diary entry on James Joyce's Ulysses (16 August 1922), quoted in Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary (1953; 1965), p. 47
“I bought the blue paper book [Ulysses], & read it here one summer I think with spasms of wonder, of discovery, & then again with long lapses of immense boredom.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Diary entry January 15, 1941.
“Margaret Ll. Davies writes that Janet is dying and will I write on her for The Times – a curious thought, rather: as if it mattered who wrote, or not. But this flooded me with the idea of Janet yesterday. I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Entry of 11 July 1937, in A Writer's Diary (1953)
“The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Essay "Lewis Carroll" (1939); reprinted in The Moment, and Other Essays (1948)
“For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Essay "Lewis Carroll" (1939)
“Dearest, I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that. But I know that I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life. It is this madness. Nothing anyone says can persuade me. You can work, and you will be much better without me. You see I can't write this even, which shows I am right. All I want to say is that until this disease came on we were perfectly happy. It was all due to you. No one could have been so good as you have been, from the very first day till now. Everyone knows that. V.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Leonard Woolf (28 March 1941), from The Virginia Woolf Reader (1984) edited by Mitchell A. Leaska, p. 369,
“One cannot grow fine flowers in a thin soil.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Women and Writing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 54. Also in
“What is this romance?" she mused. "Ah, that’s the question. I’ve never come across a definition that satisfied me, though there are some very good ones"—he glanced in the direction of his books. "It’s not altogether knowing the other person, perhaps—it’s ignorance," she hazarded. "Some authorities say it’s a question of distance—romance in literature, that is—" "Possibly, in the case of art. But in the case of people it may be—" she hesitated.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Theirs, too, is the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with the lady's-maid that high birth is a form of congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in one of those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life and speak the real language.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was enemies one wanted, not friends.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“illness often takes on the disguise of love, and plays the same odd tricks. It invests certain faces with divinity, sets us to wait, hour after hour, with pricked ears for the creaking of a stair, and wreathes the faces of the absent (plain enough in health, Heaven knows) with a new significance, while the mind concocts a thousand legends and romances about them for which it has neither time nor taste in health.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional), a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“poets have found religion in Nature; people live in the country to learn virtue from plants. It is in their indifference that they are comforting. That snowfield of the mind, where man has not trodden, is visited by the cloud, kissed by the falling petal, as, in another sphere, it is the great artists, the Miltons and the Popes, who console not by their thought of us but by their forgetfulness.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The wave of life flings itself out indefatigably. It is only the recumbent who know what, after all, Nature is at no pains to conceal—that she in the end will conquer; heat will leave the world; stiff with frost we shall cease to drag ourselves about the fields; ice will lie thick upon factory and engine; the sun will go out.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The mother is worn; the father tired. As for imagining Heaven, they have no time. Heaven-making must be left to the imagination of the poets. Without their help we can but trifle…We need the poets to imagine for us. The duty of Heaven-making should be attached to the office of the Poet Laureate.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscription on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay's knee.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A light here required a shadow there.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through with it.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She had done the usual trick – been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr Bankes) were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mrs Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren't things spoilt then, Mrs Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silence by her side) by saying them?”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. 'About life, about death; about Mrs Ramsay' – no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She alone spoke the truth; to her alone could he speak it. That was the source of her everlasting attraction for him, perhaps; she was a person to whom one could say what came into one's head.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When a subject is highly controversial — and any question about sex is that — one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young — alas, she never wrote a word... Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross-roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to-night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source