Virginia Woolf Quotes, Writing Quotes, Sacrifice Quotes

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Writing Quotes , Sacrifice Quotes

How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Thinking Quotes , People Quotes

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

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Past Quotes , Choices Quotes

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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Lying Quotes , Eye Quotes

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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Morning Quotes , Sight Quotes

Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Lying Quotes , May Quotes

What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Taken Quotes , Humor Quotes

I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Notebook Quotes , Phrases Quotes

A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Self Quotes , Six Quotes

I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Giving Quotes , Solitude Quotes

Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response).

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Reading Quotes , Air Quotes

I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Hurt Quotes , Hate Quotes

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?

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Sex Quotes , Men Quotes

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Flower Quotes , Fall Quotes

I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Writing Quotes , People Quotes

[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Funny Quotes , Pimples Quotes

The streets of London have their map, but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Passion Quotes , Maps Quotes

One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes

Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Names Quotes , Sometimes Quotes

I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Block Quotes , Reading Quotes