Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 22

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But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least in the nineteenth century, another characteristic which may be traced to the writer's sex. In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer's character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman's presence of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights.

Virginia Woolf

Sex, Character, Rights

Virginia Woolf (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.245, OUP Oxford

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For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.

Virginia Woolf

Light, Torches, Olivia

Virginia Woolf, Morag Shiach (1998). “A Room of One's Own: And, Three Guineas”, p.109

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The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.

Virginia Woolf

Peace, War, Clothes

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.797, Wordsworth Editions

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People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know.

Virginia Woolf

Writing, People, Ask Me

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Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?--startling, unexpected, unknown?

Virginia Woolf

Heart, Elderly, Air

Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.139, Virginia Woolf

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Men felt a chill in their hearts; a damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth,one subterfuge was tried after anothersentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics.

Virginia Woolf

Heart, Epic, Men

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He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a sparkle of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type.

Virginia Woolf

Imagination, Matter, Way

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.176, Wordsworth Editions

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I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices

Virginia Woolf

Suicide, Voice, Mad

Suicide note to her husband, 18 Mar. 1941

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He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.

Virginia Woolf

Space, Snow, Tree

Virginia Woolf (2012). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.96, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.

Virginia Woolf

Night, Light, Years

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.343, Wordsworth Editions

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She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was however; there she was.

Virginia Woolf

Beautiful, Clever, People

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.177, Wordsworth Editions

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That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.

Virginia Woolf

Glorious Life, Curves, Perfection

Virginia Woolf (2016). “The Waves”, p.63, Virginia Woolf

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You can't think how I depend on you, and when you're not there the colour goes out of my life.

Virginia Woolf

Thinking, Thank You Sister, Colour

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A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

Virginia Woolf

Lying, People, Feelings

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

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It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.

Virginia Woolf

Flower, Light, Long

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1031, Delphi Classics

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Wat a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.

Virginia Woolf

Book, Thinking, Forever

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4448, Delphi Classics

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Wine has a drastic, an astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I drink. Ascent of flowers, radiance and heat, are distilled here to a fiery, yellow liquid. Just behind my shoulder-blades some dry thing, wide-eyed, gently closes, gradually lulls itself to sleep. This is rapture. This is relief.

Virginia Woolf

Flower, Wine, Sleep

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...solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen. *** Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again.

Virginia Woolf

Morning, Solitude, Looks

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The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass

Virginia Woolf

Real, Home, Leaves Of Grass

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3129, Delphi Classics

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To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?

Virginia Woolf

World, Facts, Whole

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Submit to me." So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore, wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen alseep, she thought; were free like smoke, were free to come and go like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought.

Virginia Woolf

People, Suffering, Ghost

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Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.

Virginia Woolf

Running, Memories, Wind

Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.436, Wordsworth Editions

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But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

Virginia Woolf

Solitude, Undoing

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

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Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Virginia Woolf

Writing, Attachment, Play

"A Room of One's Own". Essay by Virginia Woolf (Chapter 3, pp. 43-44), October 24, 1929.

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It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.

Virginia Woolf

Taken, Dancing, Down And

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2897, Delphi Classics

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

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