Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Cierra con llave tus bibliotecas, si quieres, pero no hay barrera, cerradura, ni cerrojo que puedas imponer a la libertad de mi mente.

Septimus has been working too hard - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.

He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds—that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.

I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.

The novel is the medium which makes it possible for people of ordinary intelligence to communicate their ideas to the world.

Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted; had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses.

The reason why it is easy to kill another person must be that one's imagination is too sluggish to conceive what his life means to him - the infinite possibilities of a succession of days which are furled in him, & have already been spent.

And then she looked up and saw Flush. Something unusual in his look must have struck her. She paused. She laid down her pen. Once he had roused her with a kiss, and she thought that he was Pan. He had eaten chicken and rice pudding soaked in cream. He had given up the sunshine for her sake. She called him to her and said she forgave him.

Nothing exists outside of us except a state of mind...

So the being grows rings; identity becomes robust. What was fiery and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of life from every quarter is now methodical and orderly and flung with a purpose--so it seems.

I catch your eye. I, who had been thinking myself so vast, a temple, a church, a whole universe, confined and capable of being everywhere on the verge of things and here too, am now nothing but what you see.

This idea struck me: the army is the body : I am the brain. Thinking is my fighting. (15 May 1940)

The common fund of experience is very deep.

I like your energy. I love your legs. I long to see you.

When the white arm rests upon the knee it is a triangle; now it is upright - a column; now a fountain, falling. It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams. And for a second even now, even here, I reach my object and say, "Wander no more. All is trial and make-believe. Here is the end.

There was all the difference in the world between this planning airily away from the canvas and actually taking her brush and making the first mark.

the white spaces that lie between hour and hour

As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm.

We think back through our mothers and grandmothers, if we are women.

The sweetness of this content overflowing runs down the walls of my mind, and liberates understanding.

Why was it that relations between different people were so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so dangerous...What had Evelyn really wished to say to him? What was she feeling left alone in the empty hall? The mystery of life and the unreality even of one's own sensations overcame him as he walked down the corridor which led to his room.

faces and faces, served out like soup-plates by scullions; coarse, greedy, casual; looking in at shopwindows with pendent parcels; ogling, brushing, destroying everything, leaving even our love impure, touched now by their dirty fingers.

But for ourselves, we resent teachers. Let a man get up and say, 'Behold, this is the truth,' and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water