Quotes from Virginia Woolf

in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

Bien des choses se sont détachées de moi. J'ai survécu à certain désirs; j'ai perdu des amis, les uns par la mort, d'autres par ma simple incapacité à traverser la rue.

The brain is always thinking, but who is it who is thinking?

a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.

Children never forget injustice. They forgive heaps of things grown-up people mind; but that sin is the unpardonable sin.

Little animal that I am, sucking my flanks in and out with fear, I stand here, palpitating, trembling. But I will not be afraid. I will bring the whip down on my flanks. I am not a whimpering little animal making for the shadow.

The clock ticks. The two hands are convoys marching through a desert. The black bars on the clock face are green oases. The long hand has marched ahead to find water. The other, painfully stumbles among hot stones in the desert. It will die in the desert.

Shakespeare's state of mind

I am growing up. I am losing some illusions, perhaps to acquire others.

Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one!

Let us consider letters—how they come at breakfast, and at night, with their yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by the postmark—for to see one's own envelope on another's table is to realize how soon deeds sever and become alien. Then at last the power of the mind to quit the body is manifest, and perhaps we fear or hate or wish annihilated this phantom of ourselves, lying on the table.

Nothing so cuts the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.

Even if fall she must, it was to lie on the earth and moulder sweetly into the roots of violets.

For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsey's knee.

Long ago I realized that no other person would be to me what you are.

You send a girl to school in order to make friends - the right sort.

She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness.

Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man's soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory––away the aeroplane shot.

The window was all sky without colour. The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks. Then the curtain rose. They spoke.

If you stand a lantern under a tree every insect in the forest creeps up to it—a curious assembly, since though they scramble and swing and knock their heads against the glass, they seem to have no purpose—something senseless inspires them.

Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.

I come home—and I have a feeling of returning like a ghost to its haunt.

Oh, yes, dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair.

Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.