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Virginia Woolf Quotes

Virginia Woolf quote from classy quote

Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted; had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Childhood

They were happier now than they would ever be again. A tenpenny tea set made Cam happy for days. She heard them stamping and crowing on the floor above her head the moment they woke. They came bustling along the passage. Then the door sprang open and in they came, fresh as roses, staring, wide awake, as if this coming into the dining-room after was a positive event to them, and so on, with one thing after another, all day long, until she went up to say good-night to them, and found them netted in their cots like birds among cherries and raspberries, still making up stories about some little bit of rubbish-–something they heard, something they had picked up in the garden. They had all their little treasures. . . And so she went down and said to her husband, Why must they grow up and lose it all? Never will they be so happy again. And he was angry. Why take such a gloomy view of life? he said. It is not sensible. For it was odd; and he believed it to be true; that with all his gloom and desperation he was happier, more hopeful on the whole, than she was. Less exposed to human worries––perhaps that was it. He had always his work to fall back on.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Childhood Gender Roles Parenthood

Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Objects Thought

For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there mustbe between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and shehim.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf House Independence Licence Live Marriage People Together

I burn, I shiver, out of this sun, into this shadow.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Burn Die Existence Live

. . . distant views seemed to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Earth Nature Sky Stars

Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Solitude

But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Solitude

Talk of solitude (...). It is the last resort of the civilised: our souls are so creased and soured in meaning we can only unfold them when we are alone. (5/4/1927 - From a Letter to Vita Sackville-West)

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Solitude Writing

I begin to be impatient of solitude - to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Solitude The Waves Virginia Woolf

There was an emptiness about the heart of life, an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Authentic Self Mid Life Solitude Women

But we-' she glanced at him as if to ascertain his position, 'we see each other only now and then-''Like lights in a storm-''In the midst of a hurricane,' she concluded, as the window shook beneath the pressure of the wind.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Independence Solitude

...children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of-- to think; well, not even to think. 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.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Human Condition Solitude

My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Anxiety Writing

I have had my vision.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Vision

Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Sleep

The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Dawn Sea Sleep

But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Sleep Sleeping

James was sixteen, Cam seventeen, perhaps. She had looked round for someone who was not there, for Mrs. Ramsay, presumably. But there was only kind Mrs. Beckwith turning over her sketches under the lamp. Then, being tired, her mind still rising and falling with the sea, the taste and smell that places have after long absence possessing her, the candles wavering in her eyes, she had lost herself and gone under. It was a wonderful night, starlit; the waves sounded as they went upstairs; the moon surprised them, enormous, pale, as they passed the staircase window. She had slept at once.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Brilliant Prose Family Dynamics Genius Imagery Sleep Writing

Hail, happiness, then, and after happiness, hail not those dreams which bloat the sharp image as spotted mirrors do the face in a country-inn parlour; dreams which splinter the whole and tear us asunder and wound us and split us apart in the night when we would sleep; but sleep, sleep, so deep that all shapes are ground to dust of infinite softness, water of dimness inscrutable, and there, folded, shrouded, like a mummy, like a moth, prone let us lie on the sand at the bottom of sleep.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Birth Dreams Sleep

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Deplorable Life Sleep Virginia Wolfe

Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Alone Empty Emptyness Nothingness

alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Alone Condemned Deserted Die Freedom Isolation Joy

He is precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the rest of his life.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Love Regret

The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if they had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought --to call it by a prouder name than it deserved-- had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until --you know the little tug -- the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Fishing Ideas Inspiration

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

Virginia Woolf Age Catastrophes Deaths Diseases Kill Murders

now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year. It increased, he said, alas, perhaps, but one should be glad of it-- it went on increasing in his experience.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Age Aging

When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better--her husband; money; his books. But for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Age Decisions Difficulties Duties Life Regrets

Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Bisexual Lgbt Sexuality

Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it — a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf First Kiss First Love Lgbt Sexuality

I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Festivity Night

There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Inspirational Philosophical

As summer neared, as the evening lengthened there came to the wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the strangest kind- of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind, of stars flashing in their hearts, of outwardly the scattered parts of the vision within. In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which cloud forever and shadows form, dreams persisted; and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if you questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumph, happiness prevails, order rules, or to resist the extra ordinary stimulus to range hither and thither in search of some absolute good, some crystal of intensity remote from the known pleasures and familiar virtues, something alien to the processes of domestic life, single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand which would render the possessor secure. Moreover softened and acquiescent, the spring with their bees humming and gnats dancing threw her cloud about her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, and among passing shadows and fights of small rain seemed to have taken upon her knowledge of the sorrows of mankind.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Philosophical Virginia Woolf

Here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Philosophical

I don't care much whether I ever get to know anything - but I want to work out something in figures - something that hasn't got to do with human beings. I don't want people particularly. In some ways, Henry, I'm a humbug - I mean, I'm not what you all take me for. I'm not domestic, or very practical or sensible, really.And if I could calculate things, and use a telescope, and have to work out figures, and know to a fraction where I was wrong, I should be perfectly happy, and I believe I should give William all he wants.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Ambition Vocation

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Writing Life

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Writing Advice Writing Life

the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Kindlehighlight

One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Kindlehighlight

so that it may grow fatter and

~ Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Kindlehighlight
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