Virginia Woolf Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• Language is wine upon the lips.

  Virginia Woolf

  Wine, Tongue, Lips

• It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.

  Virginia Woolf

  Greek, Useless, Language

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

• for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge

  Virginia Woolf

  Men, Unity, Tablets

  Virginia Woolf (2006). “To the Lighthouse”, p.92, OUP Oxford

• Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

  Virginia Woolf

  Expression, Giving, Sound

• We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Reading, People

• I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases.

  Virginia Woolf

  Mother, Children, Lying

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1452, Delphi Classics

• I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.

  Virginia Woolf

  Feet, Long, Broken

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.176, Virginia Woolf

• Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.

  Virginia Woolf

  Landscape, Might, Tongue

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.422, Wordsworth Editions

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