Virginia Woolf Quotes, Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

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.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Book Quotes , Reading Quotes

Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Women Quotes , Home Quotes

Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Growing Up Quotes , Angel Quotes

Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Believe Quotes , Goes On Quotes

Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Vision Quotes , Laying Down Quotes

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Women Quotes , Diversity Quotes

To sit and contemplate - to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Men Quotes , Envy Quotes

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

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Way Quotes , Suicide Note Quotes

But what a little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes, and not only to my eyes; also to some nervous fibre, or fanlike membrane in my species.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Eye Quotes , Littles Quotes

To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Being Alone Quotes , Darkness Quotes

I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Wall Quotes , Writing Quotes

Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Running Quotes , Book Quotes

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.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Beauty Quotes , Beautiful Quotes

The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Flames Quotes , Literature Quotes

The good diarist writes either for himself alone or for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is need neither of affectation nor of restraint. Sincerity is what they ask, detail, and volume; skill with the pen comes in conveniently, but brilliance is not necessary; genius is a hindrance even; and should you know your business and do it manfully, posterity will let you off mixing with great men, reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the first ladies in the land.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Writing Quotes , Men Quotes

What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know ... I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Art Quotes , Believe Quotes

She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was however; there she was.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Clever Quotes

A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Wine Quotes , Giving Quotes

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

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Passion Quotes , Maps Quotes

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

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Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Funny Quotes , Art Quotes