Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it ...

The strange thing on looking back was the purity, the integrity of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling for a man.

And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. (...) almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. (...) [women in fiction were] not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that

I love tremendous and sonorous words.

Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life?

At one moment we deplore our birth and state and aspire to an ascetic exaltation; the next we are overcome by the smell of some old garden path and weep to hear the thrushes sing.

Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people - what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes.

I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it; fame and missed it; love and not known it; life - and behold, death is better. I have known many men and many women.' she continued; 'none have I understood. It is better that I should lie at peace here with only the sky above me - as the gipsy told me years ago. That was in Turkey.

Anyhow, she thought, they are aware of each other; they live in each other; what else is love, she asked, listening to their laughter.

The world is crammed with delightful things. I think young people make such a mistake about that — not letting themselves be happy. I sometimes think that happiness is the only thing that counts.

One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she reflected. Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought.

At the moment I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

Freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art.

Ah well, so be it. The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent's Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained — at last! — the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence — the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

She felt very young;at the same time unspeakably aged.She sliced like a knife through everything;at the same time was outside,looking on...far out to sea and alone;she always had the feeling that it was very,very dangerous to live even one day

But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

And then she said to herself, brandishing her sword at life, nonsense.

The sky is blue,' he said, 'the grass is green.' Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. 'Upon my word,' he said [...], 'I don't see that one's more true than another. Both are utterly false.

Listen. There is a sound like the knocking of railway trucks in a siding. That is the happy concatenation of one event following another in our lives. Knock, knock, knock. Must, must, must. Must go, must sleep, must wake, must get up — sober, merciful word which we pretend to revile, which we press tight to our hearts, without which we should be undone. How we worship that sound like the knocking together of trucks in a siding!

And the supreme mystery was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?

Here am I shedding one of my life-skins and all they will say is, 'Bernard is spending ten days in Rome'.

Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One's Mind about Another Person.

Love had a thousand shapes. There might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene or meeting of people (all now gone and separate),one of those globed compact things over which thought lingers, and love plays. ~Lily Briscoe