Quotes from Virginia Woolf

A whole lifetime was too short to bring out … the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning …

For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet. A poet is Atlantic and lion in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood.

One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

But for us the tragedy was but just beginning; as in the case of other wounds the pain was drugged at the moment, and made itself felt afterwards when we began to move. There was pain in all our circumstances, or a dull discomfort, a kind of restlessness and aimlessness which was even worse. Misery of this kind tends to concentrate itself upon an object, if it can find one, and there was a figure, unfortunately, who would serve our purpose very well.

Here, she felt, putting the spoon down, was the still space that lies about the heart of things, where one could move or rest...

The only truth which she could discover was the truth of what she herself felt.

to let the light of the world flood back-to say this has not happened! But why turn one's head hither and thither? This is the truth. This is fact.

One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.

Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease?

Oh, but nonsense, she thought; William must marry Lily. They have so many things in common. Lily is so fond of flowers. They are both cold and aloof and rather self-sufficing. She must arrange for them to take a long walk together.

There was no treachery too base for the world to commit.

And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy. Anyhow there was no bitterness in her; none of that sense of moral virtue which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed practically everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment.

Later she wasn't so positive perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after.

Here is Lady Winchilsea, for example, I thought, taking down her poems. She was born in the year 1661; she was noble both by birth and by marriage; she was childless; she wrote poetry, and one has only to open her poetry to find her bursting out in indignation against the position of women:

Flush has grown an absolute monarch and barks one distracted when he wants a door opened," Mrs. Browning wrote. "Robert," she continued, "declares that the said Flush considers him, my husband, to be created for the especial purpose of doing him service, and really it looks rather like it.

She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly's wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral.

Bring those parcels,' he said, nodding his head at the things Nancy had done up for them to take to the Lighthouse. 'The parcels for the Lighthouse men,' he said. He rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying: 'There is no God,' and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into space, and they both rose to follow him as he sprang, lightly like a young man, holding his parcel, on to the rock

If this is love, said Orlando to herself, looking at the Archduke on the other side of the fender, and now from the woman's point of view, there is something highly ridiculous about it.

It was only by scorning all she met that she kept herself from tears, and the friction of people brushing past her was evidently painful.

Neste mundo não existe estabilidade. Quem será capaz de exprimir o significado das coisas? Quem pode prever o voo que uma palavra descreve depois de dita? É um balão que plana sobre as árvores. E o esforço de conhecer é sempre inútil. Tudo é experiência e aventura. Constantemente formamos novas combinações de elementos desconhecidos. O que está para vir?

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.

Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a slave class.

Como uma nuvem que atravessa o sol, o silêncio caiu sobre Londres, e caiu sobre o espírito. Todo esforço é findo. Pende o tempo, do mastro. Rígido, somente o esqueleto do hábito sustenta a forma humana. E onde não há nada, disse Peter Walsh a si mesmo; o sentimento escava-se, ôco, completamente ôco. Clarissa recusou-me, pensou. E ali ficou parado, a pensar: Clarissa recusou-me.