Virginia Woolf Quotes, Writing Quotes, Aunt Quotes

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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Writing Quotes , Aunt Quotes

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Feelings Quotes , Machines Quotes

I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Museums Quotes , Lust Quotes

...the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Butterfly Quotes

One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Writing Quotes , Sea Quotes

The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of-man.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Motivational Quotes

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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Winter Quotes

But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Nature Quotes , Sunset Quotes

It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of woman's life is that.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Sex Quotes , Thinking Quotes

The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Letters Quotes

I have sometimes dreamt ... that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards -- their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble -- the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Book Quotes , Reading Quotes

For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Communication Quotes , Self Quotes

It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?... What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Hero Quotes , Men Quotes

It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Spring Quotes , Writing Quotes

Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Real Quotes , People Quotes

. . . to walk alone in London is the greatest rest.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , London Quotes

To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Reality Quotes , Literature Quotes

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Book Quotes , Judging Quotes

Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Clothes Quotes

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Virginia Woolf Quotes , Fall Quotes , Toss Quotes