Virginia Woolf Quotes About Desire

Quotes about: Desire

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

  Virginia Woolf

  Desire, Daily Life, Inarticulate

  Virginia Woolf (1990). “A moment's liberty: the shorter diary”, Vintage

• 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.

  Virginia Woolf

  Believe, Passion, Cutting

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.178, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust.

  Virginia Woolf

  Dust, Desire, Dry

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.757, Wordsworth Editions

• A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.

  Virginia Woolf

  Reading, Book, Passion

  Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie (1986). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1912-1918”, Harcourt

• 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.

  Virginia Woolf

  Museums, Lust, Desire

  Virginia Woolf (1976). “The Letters of Virginia Woolf”

• And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

  Virginia Woolf

  Horse, Men, Hair

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.779, Wordsworth Editions

• Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it.

  Virginia Woolf

  Running, Tombstone, Cutting

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2645, Delphi Classics

• a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Writing, Discovery

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3994, Delphi Classics

• No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes

  Virginia Woolf

  Believe, Passion, Men

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.178, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• No passion is stronger in the breast of 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. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party - for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue - but these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water.

  Virginia Woolf

  Party, Believe, Passion

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.178, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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.

  Virginia Woolf

  Men, Envy, Desire

  Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.16, Oxford University Press

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