Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Long years— he sighs. Again you found me. Here, she murmurs.

And that is the time to read poetry . . . when we are almost able to write it.

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.

Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness...

though romantic, he was singularly methodical and detested nothing so much as a ball of string on the floor

What passes for cookery in England is an abomination.

En cierta manera, esto era su desastre, su desdicha. Era su castigo el ver hundirse y desaparecer aquí a un hombre, allá a una mujer, en esa profunda oscuridad, mientras ella estaba obligada a permanecer aquí con su vestido de noche.

This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing.

It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue

George Eliot makes us share their lives, not in a spirit of condescension or of curiosity, but in a spirit of sympathy. She is no satirist....But she gathers in her large grasp a great bunch of the main elements of human nature and groups them loosely together with a tolerant understanding which, as one finds upon re-reading, has not only kept her figures fresh and free, but has given them an unexpected hold upon our laughter and tears.

Habits gradually change the face of one's life as time changes one's physical face; & one does not know it.

The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Music goes straight for things. It says all there is to say at once. With writing it seems to me there's so much... scratching on the matchbox

I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this. I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop - how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw in me - some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity

He should be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship, he said. She would be just as proud of him if he didn't, she answered. They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did.

For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn?

We read Charlotte Bronte not for exquisite observation of character, not for comedy, not for a philosophic view of life, but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that . . . they only have to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things

Rich people, for example, are often angry because they suspect that the poor want to seize their wealth.

Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder.

the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

last the play was ended. All had grown dark. The tears streamed down his face. Looking up into the sky there was nothing but blackness there too. Ruin and death, he thought, cover all. The life of man ends in the grave. Worms devour us.

When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words.

It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds