Quotes from Virginia Woolf

People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more then they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime.

Thus I hope to have kept the sound of the sea and the birds, dawn and garden subconsciously present, doing their work under ground.

Is it not possible — I often wonder — that things we have felt with great intensity have an experience independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible,in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? …Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past

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 chains.

It is much more important to be oneself than anything else.

Looking upwards, she speculates still more ambitiously upon the nature of the moon, and if the stars are blazing jellies; looking downwards she wonders if the fishes know that the sea is salt; opines that our heads are full of fairies, 'dear to God as we are'; muses whether there are not other worlds than ours, and reflects that the next ship may bring us word of a new one. In short, 'we are in utter darkness'. Meanwhile, what a rapture is thought!

That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library.

I fear I shall be a clinger to the outsides of words all my life.

Distance had an extraordinary power.

I know this room too well - this view too well - I am getting it all out of focus, because I can't walk through it.

As I write, there rises somewhere in my head that queer and very pleasant sense of something which I want to write; my own point of view...

So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy.

History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

I'll be blasted', he said, 'if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I'll write, from this day forward, to please myself

The light touched something green in the window corner and made it a lump of emerald, a cave of pure green like stoneless fruit. It sharpened the edges of chairs and tables and stitched white table-cloths with fine gold wires.

Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had time to read them. Alas! even the books that had been given her, and inscribed by the hand of the poet himself: 'For her whose wishes must be obeyed' ... 'The happier Helen of our day' ... disgraceful to say, she had never read them.

It would be a comfort, she felt, to lean; to sit down; yes, to lie down; never, never, never to get up again.

Yet these roaring waters, said Neville, upon which we build our crazy platforms are more stable than the wild, the weak and inconsequent cries that we utter when, trying to speak, we rise; when we reason and jerk out these false sayings, 'I am this; I am that!' Speech is false.

If anyone could have saved me it would have been you.

But none speaks with a single voice. None with a voice free from the old vibrations. Always I hear corrupt murmurs; the chink of gold and metal. Mad music...

Now I will walk, as if I had an end in view, across the room, to the balcony under the awning. I see the sky, softly feathered with its sudden effulgence of moon. I also see the railings of the square, and two people without faces, leaning like statues against the sky. There is then a world immune from change. When I have passed through this drawing room flickering with tongues that cut me like knives, making me stammer, making me lie, I find faces rid of features, robed in beauty.

But it is always a question whether I wish to avoid these glooms. These weeks give one a plunge into deep waters. One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth.

The streamers of my consciousness waver out and are perpetually torn and distressed by their disorder.