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Top Virginia Woolf Quotes

Browse top 962 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Virginia Woolf.

Favorite Virginia Woolf Quotes

1. "I am drowning, my dear, in seas of fire." ~ Virginia Woolf
2. "She was off like a bird, bullet, or arrow, impelled by what desire, shot by whom, at what directed, who could say?" ~ Virginia Woolf
3. "So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof, a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, 'This is he,' or, 'This is she." ~ Virginia Woolf
4. "Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that's what you feel, was one; that's what I feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now. It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem's (Paul's was exquisite) into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road." ~ Virginia Woolf
5. "it being her experience that the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their feelings" ~ Virginia Woolf
6. "Clarissa had a theory in those days—they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not "here, here, here"; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter—even trees, or barns." ~ Virginia Woolf
7. "E poi, ora che era condannato, abbandonato da tutti, completamente solo, come è solo chi sta per morire, c'era un privilegio in questo, un isolamento che aveva del sublime, una libertà che chi ha legami non potrà mai conoscere." ~ Virginia Woolf
8. "Era solo da sempre." ~ Virginia Woolf
9. "Then there's Queen Victoria, like a large tea cosy, & Wellington, sleek as a mastiff with paw extended . . ." ~ Virginia Woolf
10. "Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt." ~ Virginia Woolf
11. "One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy." ~ Virginia Woolf
12. "Era comunque una forma di rapporto esigente. Altri oggetti di adorazione si contentavano quell'adorazione; uomini, donne, Dio, tutti permettevano che si adorassero prostrati in ginocchio; ma quella forma, fosse anche soltanto l'alone di un paralume bianco contro un tavolo di vimini, incitava a un combattimento perpetuo, sfidava a una lotta in cui si era costretti ad avere la peggio. Sempre (era nella sua natura, o nel suo sesso, non sapeva quale delle due) prima di scambiare la fluidità della vita con la concentrazione della pittura ella aveva qualche momento di nudità in cui pareva un'anima mai nata, un'anima spogliata del corpo, esitante su qualche pinnacolo ventoso ed esposta senza protezione a tutti i soffi di dubbio." ~ Virginia Woolf
13. "...a hullámok monoton bukdosása a parton, mely többnyire ütemesen s megnyugtatóan kísérte gondolatait, ahogy ott ült gyermekei körében, már-már vigasztaló ritmust verve, s akár ha a természet hajtogatná egy régi-régi bölcsodal szavaival: "Nem hagylak el - megvédelek...", máskor viszont hirtelen, váratlanul, s foleg ha figyelme elterelodött épp a pillanatnyi teendorol, mintha egyáltalán nem sugallt volna ily vigaszos jelentést, nem, de mint kísérteties dobok pergése, szólt az élet mértékeirol, hogy aki hallja, a pusztulásra gondoljon, itt e szigetére, a tenger ölén, s ot magát arra figyelmezteti, hogy napjai hiába telnek hol ezzel, hol azzal a valóságos kis teendovel, anyagtalanok csak, mint a szivárvány - ez a monotonság, mely tompán rejlezett eleddig más hangok mögé, most egyszerre ott dübörgött, mint hatalmas üregben, a fülében, s o maga óhatatlan borzadállyal kapta fel nyomban a fejét." ~ Virginia Woolf
14. "Nothing exists outside of us except a state of mind..." ~ Virginia Woolf
15. "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, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot." ~ Virginia Woolf
16. "In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether they were beggars or people of substance." ~ Virginia Woolf
17. "Looking upwards, she speculates still more ambitiously upon the nature of the moon, and if the stars are blazing jellies; looking downwards she wonders if the fishes know that the sea is salt; opines that our heads are full of fairies, 'dear to God as we are'; muses whether there are not other worlds than ours, and reflects that the next ship may bring us word of a new one. In short, 'we are in utter darkness'. Meanwhile, what a rapture is thought!" ~ Virginia Woolf
18. "One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them." ~ Virginia Woolf
19. "All the same that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park...then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was! -- that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all." ~ Virginia Woolf
20. "But she could not reduce her vision to words, since it was no single shape coloured upon the dark, but rather a general excitement, an atmosphere, which, when she tried to visualize it, took form as a wind scouring the flanks of the northern hills and flashing light upon cornfields and pools." ~ Virginia Woolf
21. "I jumped up and ran after the words that trailed like the dangling string from an air ball, up and up, from branch to branch escaping. Then like a cracked bowl the fixity of my morning broke, and putting down the bag of flour I thought, Life stands round me like glass round the imprisoned reed." ~ Virginia Woolf
22. "Hail! natural desire! Hail! happiness! divine happiness! and pleasure of all sorts, flowers and wine, though one fades and the other intoxicates; and half-crown tickets out of London on Sundays, and singing in a dark chapel hymns about death, and anything, anything that interrupts and confounds the tapping of typewriters and filing of letters and forging of links and chains, binding the Empire together." ~ Virginia Woolf
23. "The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." ~ Virginia Woolf
24. "Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels" ~ Virginia Woolf
25. "quels soucis de gloire, quel intérêt, quelles satisfactions, et elles sont nombreuses, la lutte lui apporte?Sans la guerre il n y aurait pas de débouchés pour les nombreuses qualités viriles développées par la lutte; se battre ainsi demeure une caractéristique du sexe masculin [...] c est, disent certains la contrepartie de l instinct maternel, qu il ne peuvent, eux, partager" ~ Virginia Woolf
26. "Poor little place,' he murmured with a sigh. She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usual. All this phrase-making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now." ~ Virginia Woolf
27. "By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream" ~ Virginia Woolf
28. "For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver." ~ Virginia Woolf
29. "Alone, over my dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories." ~ Virginia Woolf
30. "I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.But he never liked anyone who--our friends,' said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her.Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I've ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight." ~ Virginia Woolf
31. "...she felt, with her hand on the nursery door, that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically (the feeling was one of relief and happiness) it was all one stream..." ~ Virginia Woolf
32. "Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts." ~ Virginia Woolf
33. "He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds—that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things." ~ Virginia Woolf
34. "Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday" ~ Virginia Woolf
35. "I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hourto consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to myworld." ~ Virginia Woolf
36. "Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above." ~ Virginia Woolf
37. "Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day." ~ Virginia Woolf
38. "This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears." ~ Virginia Woolf
39. "There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death…" ~ Virginia Woolf
40. "A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out." ~ Virginia Woolf
41. "So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words." ~ Virginia Woolf
42. "When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred." ~ Virginia Woolf
43. "But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing." ~ Virginia Woolf
44. "...it struck her, this was tragedy-- not palls, dust, and the shroud; but children coerced, their spirits subdued." ~ Virginia Woolf
45. "Would there be trees if we didn't see them?" ~ Virginia Woolf
46. "I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure." ~ Virginia Woolf
47. "For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice." ~ Virginia Woolf
48. "It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality." ~ Virginia Woolf
49. "He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship -- it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out." ~ Virginia Woolf
50. "I exist only in the soles of my feet and in the tired muscles of my thighs. We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot remember." ~ Virginia Woolf
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Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can't create it if you don't have one."
Author: Brad Bird

What Did Virginia Woolf Talk About?

Wit
Thin
She
Here
Per
Ear
Con
Thou
Hen
Ten
Lit
King
Hey
End
Though
Self
Tan
Low
Ought
Ring
Pen
Sin
Able
Win
Use
Read
Mind
Era
Old
Sit
Son
Owe
Light
Mad
Seem
Said
Ape
Again
Word
Boo
Act
Lie
Ally
Book
Sing
Hear
Wing
Hum
Air
Ways

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