Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 21

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That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.

Virginia Woolf

Character, Mean, Thinking

Virginia Woolf (1932). “A Letter to a Young Poet”

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A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.

Virginia Woolf

Always Trying, Trying, Sides

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.294, Wordsworth Editions

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No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party - for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue - but these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water.

Virginia Woolf

Party, Believe, Passion

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.178, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?

Virginia Woolf

Stars, Hero, Book

Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.28, Virginia Woolf

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What a lark! What a plunge!

Virginia Woolf

Larks, Plunge

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.45, Broadview Press

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And I will now rock the brown basin from side to side so that my ships may ride the waves. Some will founder. Some will dash themselves against the cliffs. One sails alone. That is my ship. It sails into icy caverns where the sea-bear barks and stalactites swing green chairs. The waves rise, their crests curl; look at the lights on the mastheads. They have scattered, they have foundered, all except my ship which mounts the wave and sweeps before the gale and reaches the islands where the parrots chatter and then the creepers.

Virginia Woolf

Light, Rocks, Swings

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1307, Delphi Classics

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We [women] have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that ... takes time.

Virginia Woolf

Years, Age, Statistics

Virginia Woolf (2015). “A Room of One's Own: And Three Guineas”, p.85, Oxford University Press, USA

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Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.

Virginia Woolf

Clouds, Sharks, Hands

Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.58, Virginia Woolf

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It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

Virginia Woolf

Feelings, Machines, Critical Moments

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1120, Delphi Classics

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In each of us two powers preside, one male, one female: and in the man's brain, the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman's brain, the woman predominates over the man...If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties.

Virginia Woolf

Men, Two, Brain

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Yet, she said to herself, form the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this--love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.

Virginia Woolf

Beautiful, Judging, Rose

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Ao farol: To the lighthouse: Edição bilíngue português - inglês”, p.250, Editora Landmark LTDA

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If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

Virginia Woolf

Women, Writing, Secret

Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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The good diarist writes either for himself alone or for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is need neither of affectation nor of restraint. Sincerity is what they ask, detail, and volume; skill with the pen comes in conveniently, but brilliance is not necessary; genius is a hindrance even; and should you know your business and do it manfully, posterity will let you off mixing with great men, reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the first ladies in the land.

Virginia Woolf

Writing, Men, Land

Virginia Woolf (1967). “Collected essays”

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To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bend her head as if to let her pelt f jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked.

Virginia Woolf

Dirty, Thinking, People

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The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom.

Virginia Woolf

Butterfly, Shade, Lasts

Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.83, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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It is the duty of the writer to describe.

Virginia Woolf

Duty

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Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?

Virginia Woolf

Lying, Past, Reality

Virginia Woolf (2015). “Monday or Tuesday”, p.47, Virginia Woolf

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So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living.

Virginia Woolf

Life, Children, Silver

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4395, Delphi Classics

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I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

Virginia Woolf

Book, Army, Two

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.99, Wordsworth Editions

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Conversation, fastidious goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will.

Virginia Woolf

Blood, Bricks, Goddess

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.918, Delphi Classics

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I must try to set aside half an hour in some part of my day, and consecrate it to diary writing. Give it a name and a place, and then perhaps, such is the human mind, I shall come to think it a duty, and disregard other duties for it.

Virginia Woolf

Writing, Thinking, Names

"A Moment's Liberty". Book by Virginia Woolf, 1990.

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To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.

Virginia Woolf

Song, Silly, Fall

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1221, Delphi Classics

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... 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

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Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!

Virginia Woolf

Drawing, Rooms

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.29, Broadview Press

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The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.

Virginia Woolf

Romantic, Cutting, Romance

Virginia Woolf (2013). “The Common Reader”, p.187, 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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