Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 11

Quotes about:

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

  Virginia Woolf

  Truth, Business, Mean

  "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid".

  9 Copy quote

• To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.

  Virginia Woolf

  Reading, Delight, Chiefs

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “The Common Reader”, p.63, Lulu Press, Inc

  4 Copy quote

• I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments.

  Virginia Woolf

  Mean, Mind, Different

  Source: therumpus.net

  10 Copy quote

• It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.

  Virginia Woolf

  People, Trying, Hints

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.734, Delphi Classics

  18 Copy quote

• it is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams

  Virginia Woolf

  Dream, Strange, Chaos

  Virginia Woolf (2005). “The Waves”, p.235, Collector's Library

  9 Copy quote

• Life stand still here.

  Virginia Woolf

  Crafts, Stills

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.361, Wordsworth Editions

  8 Copy quote

• For there is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light.

  Virginia Woolf

  Truth, Light, Giving

  Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.95, Oxford University Press

  4 Copy quote

• If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy.

  Virginia Woolf

  Dies, Ifs

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.184, Broadview Press

  10 Copy quote

• One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.

  Virginia Woolf

  Running, Jugs, Subtle

  Virginia Woolf, Jan Morris (1993). “Travels with Virginia Woolf”, Random House (UK)

  7 Copy quote

• But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them.

  Virginia Woolf

  Facts, Impossible, Nevertheless

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.310, Wordsworth Editions

  4 Copy quote

• I have sometimes dreamt ... that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards -- their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble -- the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Reading, Names

  Virginia Woolf (1972). “Collected essays”

  9 Copy quote

• Whenever you see a board up with "Trespassers will be prosecuted," trespass at once.

  Virginia Woolf

  Boards

  Virginia Woolf (1992). “A woman's essays: selected essays, volume one”

  7 Copy quote

• Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

  Virginia Woolf

  Best Friend, Friendship, Real Friends

  Virginia Woolf (2005). “The Waves”, p.228, Collector's Library

  49 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

• It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.

  Virginia Woolf

  Reality, Tears, Transparency

  14 Copy quote

• But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.

  Virginia Woolf

  Life, Lying, Thinking

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Years - Including a Short Biography of the Author”, p.282, Read Books Ltd

  16 Copy quote

• Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?

  Virginia Woolf

  Sleep, People, Want

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1789, Delphi Classics

  10 Copy quote

• The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.

  Virginia Woolf

  Artist, Order, Effort

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  13 Copy quote

• All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.

  Virginia Woolf

  Flower, Fall, Mind

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.604, Wordsworth Editions

  12 Copy quote

• For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together

  Virginia Woolf

  Love, Hands, Opposites

  Virginia Woolf, Michael H. Whitworth (2014). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.70, Oxford University Press, USA

  11 Copy quote

• To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

  Virginia Woolf

  Father, Work, Slavery

  Virginia Woolf, Morag Shiach (1998). “A Room of One's Own: And, Three Guineas”, p.173

  10 Copy quote

• I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.

  Virginia Woolf

  Fall, Sea, White

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.152, Virginia Woolf

  12 Copy quote

• The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.

  Virginia Woolf

  Art, Philosophy, Writing

  Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.21, Oxford University Press

  8 Copy quote

• Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Men, Others Opinions

  A Room of One's Own (1929) ch. 3

  52 Copy quote

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