Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 20

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She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

Virginia Woolf

Happiness, Taxi Cabs, Sea

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.132, Wordsworth Editions

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To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.

Virginia Woolf

Morning, Home, Writing

Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.20, Oxford University Press

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One could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there?

Virginia Woolf

Eye, Wrinkles, Ideas

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to write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I were nailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.

Virginia Woolf

Writing, Heart, Flags

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

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Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.

Virginia Woolf

Flower, Tree, Darkness

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.68, Broadview Press

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To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.

Virginia Woolf

Passion, Games, Feeling Alone

Virginia Woolf (2005). “The Waves”, p.43, Collector's Library

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Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.

Virginia Woolf

Taken, Thinking, People

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.10, Broadview Press

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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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There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.

Virginia Woolf

Shining, Rubies, Fleeting

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.322, Wordsworth Editions

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One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, silence there ... the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art.

Virginia Woolf

Art, Silence, Facts

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4298, Delphi Classics

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Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the misery, the grind, are forgotten everytime; and one launches another, and it seems sheer joy and buoyancy.

Virginia Woolf

Book, Writing, Joy

Virginia Woolf, Joanne Trautmann Banks (1975). “The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1923-1928”, Harcourt on Demand

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It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.

Virginia Woolf

Fighting, Impossible, Humans

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Voyage Out”, p.74, Virginia Woolf

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A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.

Virginia Woolf

Writing, Use, Littles

Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.123, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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... the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depend.

Virginia Woolf

Nice, Two, Age

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.264, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.

Virginia Woolf

Beautiful, Want, Prose

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4321, Delphi Classics

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There was a day when I liked writing letters -- it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains.

Virginia Woolf

Passion, Writing, Gone

Virginia Woolf (1975). “The letters of Virginia Woolf”

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We scarcely wish to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.

Virginia Woolf

Want, Feels, Humans

"Complete Works of Virginia Woolf".

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A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.

Virginia Woolf

Art, Knowing, Play

Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie (1986). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925-1928”, Chatto & Windus

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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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If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.

Virginia Woolf

Mean, Thinking, People

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For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.

Virginia Woolf

Morning, Sight, Years

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Collected Novels of Virginia Woolf - Volume II - Between the Acts, Mrs Dalloway, Orlando”, p.290, Read Books Ltd

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Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

Virginia Woolf

Art, Mean, Wool

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4186, Delphi Classics

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...the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.

Virginia Woolf

Beautiful, Butterfly, Wings

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.367, Wordsworth Editions

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I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.

Virginia Woolf

Believe, Expression, Don't Believe

Virginia Woolf (1975). “The letters of Virginia Woolf”

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To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.

Virginia Woolf

Art, Reading, Difficult

Virginia Woolf (2013). “The Common Reader”, p.375, Lulu Press, Inc

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Born: January 25, 1882
Died: March 28, 1941
Occupation: Writer
Cite this Page: Citation

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