Virginia woolf quotes

I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.

For now she need not think of anybody. She coud 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... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.

All extremes of feeling are allied to madness.

Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence

All extremes are dangerous.

The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

Intimacy is a difficult art.

How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.

Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.

I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.

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

The only advice ... 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.

How can I express the darkness?

I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd.

She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!

The truer the facts the better the fiction.

He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

Without self awareness we are as babies in the cradles.

Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.

These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.

I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

The compensation of growing old ... was simply this; that the passion remains as strong as ever, but one has gained -- at last! -- the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence -- the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.

My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.

There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

Language is wine upon the lips.

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.

By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

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

And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.

Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.

Above all you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world.

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.

Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.

Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

I like to have space to spread my mind out in.

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.

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their sense. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. Humanity goes. Money making becomes so important that they must work by night as well as by day. Health goes. And so competitive do they become that they will not share their work with others though they have more themselves. What then remains of a human being who has lost sight, sound, and sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave.

I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life

But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

Words belong to each other.

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

Love had a thousand shapes.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action.

But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.

The depths of the sea are only water after all.

Thoughts without words… Can that be?

Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotchpotch of impulses, our perpetual miracle - for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death; let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.

Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments.

For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married

A perfect treat must include a trip to a second-hand bookshop.

A light here required a shadow there.

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

For nothing was simply one thing.

No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.

Thinking is my fighting.

One must learn to be silent just as one must learn to talk.

I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.

I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin.

And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.

Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.

Fear no more, says the heart.

But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful.

The way to write well is to live intensely.

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

Life without illusion is a ghostly affair.

I will dream today; for I must unscrew my head somehow.

Yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.

Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

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.

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.

In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

The artist after all is a solitary being.

When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.

The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman.

We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

The mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions.

For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.

Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself.

If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover seeds of truth.

I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.

Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having.

Night had come—night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

Soup is cuisines kindest course

I am rooted, but I flow.

The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.