Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 14

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• The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now— James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too.

  Virginia Woolf

  Eye, Black And White, Rocks

  26 Copy quote

• Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.

  Virginia Woolf

  Sad, Knives, Orlando

  Virginia Woolf, Michael H. Whitworth (2014). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.28, Oxford University Press, USA

  13 Copy quote

• Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?

  Virginia Woolf

  Women, Army, Blessing

  Virginia Woolf, Morag Shiach (1998). “A Room of One's Own: And, Three Guineas”, p.146

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• For we think back through our mothers if we are women.

  Virginia Woolf

  Mom, Mother, Thinking

  1929 A Room of One's Own, ch.4.

  8 Copy quote

• what she loved: life, London, this moment of june.

  Virginia Woolf

  June, London, Moments

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.4, Broadview Press

  7 Copy quote

• I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.

  Virginia Woolf

  Thinking, Facts, Want

  Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2001). “The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction”, p.5, Oxford University Press, USA

  6 Copy quote

• Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.

  Virginia Woolf

  Lying, Eye, Differences

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2751, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

• Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, People, Imperfection

  1925 The Common Reader, 'George Eliot'.

  9 Copy quote

• As for 'drawing you out,' please believe I don't do such things deliberately, with an object -- It's only that I am, as a rule, far more interested in people than they are in me -- But it makes me a nuisance, I know: only an innocent nuisance.

  Virginia Woolf

  Believe, Drawing, People

  Virginia Woolf, Joanne Trautmann Banks (1977). “A change of perspective”, Vintage

  6 Copy quote

• I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

  Virginia Woolf

  Notebook, Phrases, Stories

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.137, Virginia Woolf

  8 Copy quote

• I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.

  Virginia Woolf

  Hurt, Hate, Men

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.587, Wordsworth Editions

  4 Copy quote

• I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.

  Virginia Woolf

  Weed, Women, Lying

  Virginia Woolf (2005). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.687, Wordsworth Editions

  9 Copy quote

• If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people readingfor the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Reading, Mean

  Georg Brand, Virginia Woolf, Koizumi Yakumo, Hernández Felisberto (2017). “ON READING: Le plaisir de lire”, p.43, Pieffe Edizioni via PublishDrive

  6 Copy quote

• King old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always to to a good man, they say.

  Virginia Woolf

  Kings, Character, Cat

  7 Copy quote

• Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.

  Virginia Woolf

  Running, Philosophy, Hands

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1411, Delphi Classics

  136 Copy quote

• The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness

  Virginia Woolf

  Sleep, Night, Sea

  Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.112, Virginia Woolf

  8 Copy quote

• Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.

  Virginia Woolf

  Dream, Night, Hands

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.214, Virginia Woolf

  17 Copy quote

• For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone. "What is it to be in love?" she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea. Hypnotized by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew away, she rose, and within, her two books beneath her arm returned again, much as a soldier prepares for battle.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Butterfly, Discovery

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.157, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

• . . . to walk alone in London is the greatest rest.

  Virginia Woolf

  London, Walks

  Virginia Woolf (2009). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1929-1932”, Chatto & Windus

  6 Copy quote

• There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

  Virginia Woolf

  Fashion, Heart, Views

  Virginia Woolf (1995). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.92, Wordsworth Editions

  7 Copy quote

• Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough.

  Virginia Woolf

  Art, Real, World

  4 Copy quote

• O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!

  Virginia Woolf

  Flower, Pages, Shakespeare's Sonnets

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.64, Virginia Woolf

  5 Copy quote

• These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

  Virginia Woolf

  Time, Believe, Optimistic

  Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.193, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  60 Copy quote

• It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man.

  Virginia Woolf

  Art, Women, Men

  Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.136, Oxford University Press

  4 Copy quote

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