Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Something irrevocable has happened. A circle has been cast on the waters; a chain is imposed. We shall never flow freely again.

I'm not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and arrows of sadness.

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

We are all swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shade...

Let us turn over the pages, and I will add, for your amusement, a comment in the margin.

Indeed my aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky.

and to forget one's own sharp absurd little personality, reputation and the rest of it, one should read; see outsiders; think more; write more logically; above all be full of work; and practise anonymity. Silence in company; or the quietest statement, not the showiest; is also medicated as the doctors say. It was an empty party, rather, last night. Very nice here, though.

I ask now, standing with my scissors among my flowers, Where can the shadow enter? [. . .] I am sick of the body, I am sick of my own craft, industry and cunning, of the unscrupulous ways of the mother who protects, who collects under her jealous eyes at one long table her own children, always her own.

I am wrapped round with phrases, like damp straw; I glow, phosphorescent.

For now that Aphra Behn had done it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance; I can make money by my pen.

He felt the need for something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced amorous gales every evening about this time.

The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.

La vida es un sueño, despertar es lo que nos mata.

The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the wind, flashed into Rachel's mind, and she became profoundly excited at the thought of living.

For," the outsider will say, "in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country.

It was a great mistake to have come. He should have stayed at home and read his book, thought Peter Walsh; should have gone to a music hall; he should have stayed at home, for he knew no one.

But she could not reduce her vision to words, since it was no single shape coloured upon the dark, but rather a general excitement, an atmosphere, which, when she tried to visualize it, took form as a wind scouring the flanks of the northern hills and flashing light upon cornfields and pools.

To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it - the poets and the novelists - can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma - a mirage.

Everyone has friends who were killed in the War. Everyone gives up something when they marry.

To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people's eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self.

Nothing need be said; nothing could be said.

Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of darkness.

I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.

Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their stories.