Virginia Woolf Quotes About House

Quotes about: House

• Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Dark, Squares

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.71, Wordsworth Editions

• 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

  Children, House, Anxiety

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4304, Delphi Classics

• To enjoy freedom ... we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose.

  Virginia Woolf

  Freedom, Rain, Order

  Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee (2000). “A room of one's own and other essays”

• Safe! safe! safe!' the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry 'Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.

  Virginia Woolf

  Happiness, Heart, Light

  Virginia Woolf (2015). “Monday or Tuesday”, p.5, Virginia Woolf

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

  Virginia Woolf

  Women, Home, House

  The Common Reader "Lady Dorothy Nevill" (1925) See Crisp 2; Hemans 3

• 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.

  Virginia Woolf

  Spring, Writing, Practice

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “The Common Reader”, p.344, Lulu Press, Inc

• Yes, yes, I'm coming. Right up the top of the house. One moment I'll linger. How the mud goes round in the mind-what a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts itself, and a gain through the eyes one sees clear and still, and there comes to the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those one nods to, the one never meets again.

  Virginia Woolf

  Weed, Prayer, Eye

  Virginia Woolf (2014). “Monday or Tuesday: Eight Stories”, p.25, Simon and Schuster

• But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter!

  Virginia Woolf

  Beautiful, Eye, Winter

  Virginia Woolf (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.303, OUP Oxford

• The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.

  Virginia Woolf

  Children, Book, Reading

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.123, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpended the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a fingerprint of a shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.

  Virginia Woolf

  Wall, Garden, Light

• Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.

  Virginia Woolf

  Night, Light, Years

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.343, Wordsworth Editions

• ... the random talk of people who have no chance of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often, of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which will weave itself into the moment for ever.

  Virginia Woolf

  Beautiful, Light, People

  Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.27, Oxford University Press

• Anecdote: A house that is rooted to one spot but can travel as quickly as you change your mind and is complete in itself is surely the most desirable of houses. Our modern house with its cumbersome walls and its foundations planted deep in the ground is nothing better than a prison and more and more prison like does it become the longer we live there, and wear fetters of a association and sentiment.

  Virginia Woolf

  Wall, House, Mind

• Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today -- that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past.

  Virginia Woolf

  Marriage, Memories, Writing

• Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Attachment, Play

  "A Room of One's Own". Essay by Virginia Woolf (Chapter 3, pp. 43-44), October 24, 1929.

• I like the copious, shapeless, warm, not so very clever, but extremely easy and rather coarse aspect of things; the talk of men in clubs and public-houses; of miners half naked in drawers the forthright, perfectly unassuming, and without end in view except dinner, love, money and getting along tolerably; that which is without great hopes, ideals, or anything of that kind; what is unassuming except to make a tolerably, good job of it. I like all that.

  Virginia Woolf

  Jobs, Clever, Men

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.755, Wordsworth Editions

• In marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house.

  Virginia Woolf

  People, House, Independence

  Virginia Woolf (1996). “Mrs Dalloway”, p.6, Wordsworth Editions

• For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.

  Virginia Woolf

  Spiritual, House, World

  Virginia Woolf, Morag Shiach (1998). “A Room of One's Own: And, Three Guineas”, p.365

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