Virginia Woolf Quotes & Virginia Woolf Sayings

A strange thing has happened -- while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time. Virginia Woolf A woman must have money and a room of her own Virginia Woolf A woman must have money and room of her own if she is to write fiction Virginia Woolf Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! Virginia Woolf Popular Quotes All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. Virginia Woolf Adages 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. Virginia Woolf 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 a highly ornamental pot. As people mature, they cease to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots. Virginia Woolf Quotations Arrange whatever pieces come your way Virginia Woolf Quotes As a woman, I have no country. As a woman my country is the world. Virginia Woolf Sayings As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers’ clerks will have to make flying leaps into the mud; young lady typists will have to fidget behind you. In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is better not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand. Virginia Woolf But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying. Virginia Woolf But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors. Virginia Woolf Conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will. Virginia Woolf Quotes 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 very opposite of what it is above. Virginia Woolf Popular Quotes 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 very opposite of what it is above....Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works. Virginia Woolf Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title Virginia Woolf Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title. Virginia Woolf Remarks Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book shown to him by heart, and his friends can only read the title. Virginia Woolf Adages 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. So, in the name of health and sanity, let us not dwell on the end of the journey. Virginia Woolf Adages Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works. Virginia Woolf Quotations 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. Virginia Woolf Quotes For most of history, Anonymous was a woman. Virginia Woolf Quotations For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected. Virginia Woolf Quotes For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year? Virginia Woolf Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. Virginia Woolf Adages How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I meant, what is the reality of any feeling? Virginia Woolf Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue Virginia Woolf Sayings I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. Virginia Woolf I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't. Virginia Woolf I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street. Virginia Woolf Quotations I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure. Virginia Woolf Adages I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in. Virginia Woolf I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose. Virginia Woolf Sayings I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I write. Virginia Woolf If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded. . ., it was Shakespeare's mind. Virginia Woolf Adages If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure -- the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully? Virginia Woolf Quotes If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged Virginia Woolf Sayings If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged. Virginia Woolf Sayings If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think Virginia Woolf If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. Virginia Woolf Popular Quotes If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ''our'' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share. Virginia Woolf Sayings In fiction, where so much of personality is revealed, the absence of charm is a great lack, ... and her critics, who have been, of course, mostly of the opposite sex, have resented, half consciously perhaps, her deficiency in a quality which is held to be supremely desirable in women. George Eliot was not charming; she was not strongly feminine; she had none of those eccentricities and inequalities of temper which give to so many artists the endearing simplicity of children. Virginia Woolf Sayings Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will. Virginia Woolf Adages It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer. Virginia Woolf Popular Quotes It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality Virginia Woolf It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality Virginia Woolf It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. Virginia Woolf It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. Virginia Woolf It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. Virginia Woolf It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity; and we should have the immense pleasure into the bargain of watching Professor X rush for his measuring-rods to prove himself ''superior.'' Virginia Woolf Sayings It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses. Virginia Woolf Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. More than anything... it calls for confidence in oneself...And how can we generate this imponderable quality most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. Virginia Woolf Remarks 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. Virginia Woolf Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others Virginia Woolf Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth. Virginia Woolf Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once. Virginia Woolf Remarks Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded Virginia Woolf Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded. Virginia Woolf Quotations Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order. Virginia Woolf On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points. Virginia Woolf One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well Virginia Woolf Adages One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. Virginia Woolf Remarks One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats and one always secretes too much jelly. Virginia Woolf 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 Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art. Virginia Woolf Sayings Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. Virginia Woolf Remarks Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life. Virginia Woolf Quotes So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living. Virginia Woolf Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. Virginia Woolf Remarks The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. Virginia Woolf Quotations The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers. Virginia Woolf The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth. Virginia Woolf The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. Virginia Woolf Remarks The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. Virginia Woolf Remarks The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general. Virginia Woolf Sayings The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige. Virginia Woolf Sayings The mind is the most capricious of insects - flitting, fluttering. Virginia Woolf The older one grows, the more one likes indecency. Virginia Woolf The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions-there we have none. Virginia Woolf Popular Quotes The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping. Virginia Woolf 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. Virginia Woolf Remarks There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they would mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking. Virginia Woolf There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking. Virginia Woolf Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect either myself or my country. “For,” the outsider will say, “in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. Virginia Woolf Popular Quotes These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. Virginia Woolf This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. Virginia Woolf This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say. Virginia Woolf To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves. Virginia Woolf Sayings To enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot. Virginia Woolf To enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot. Virginia Woolf Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face -- as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought. Virginia Woolf We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to someone opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey! Virginia Woolf Sayings We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods. Virginia Woolf Quotes 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. Virginia Woolf What is meant by ''reality''? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying Virginia Woolf Quotations When a subject is highly controversial... 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 When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument. Virginia Woolf When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly. Virginia Woolf Adages When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. Virginia Woolf Adages Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body? Virginia Woolf Why are women ... so much more interesting to men than men are to women? Virginia Woolf Sayings Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women? Virginia Woolf Popular Quotes Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. Virginia Woolf Adages Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradles. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. Virginia Woolf Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time Virginia Woolf Sayings 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 Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses providing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man as twice its natural size. Virginia Woolf Popular Quotes Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. Virginia Woolf [Queen Victoria] knew her own mind. But the mind radically commonplace, only its inherited force, and cumulative sense of power, making it remarkable. Virginia Woolf “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?” Virginia Woolf