Quotes from Virginia Woolf

They do not understand that that I have to effect different transitions; have to cover the entrances and exits of several different men who alternately act their parts as Bernard.

Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss.

Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older! or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters. Nothing made up for the loss. When she read just now to James, and there were numbers of soldiers with kettle-drums and trumpets, and his eyes darkened, she thought, why should they grow up, and lose all that?

She lives in dreams, alone.

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought, and no doubt if you are of a mystical tendency, consolation, and even explanation, shower down from the unbroken surface.

Dr. Holmes came again. Large, fresh coloured, handsome, flicking his boots, looking in the glass, he brushed it all aside-headaches, sleeplessness, fears, dreams-nerve symptoms and nothing more, he said.

They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love

She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.

It is worth mentioning, for future reference,that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.

it being her experience that the religious ecstasy made people callous (so did causes); dulled their feelings

Let him be fifty feet away, let him not even speak to you, let him not even see you, he permeated, he prevailed, he imposed himself. He changed everything.

The most monstrous monster is the monster with noble feelings

One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done--for

And somehow or other, the windows being open, and the book held so that it rested upon a background of escallonia hedges and distant blue, instead of being a book it seemed as if what I read was laid upon the landscape not printed, bound, or sewn up, but somehow the product of trees and fields and the hot summer sky, like the air which swam, on fine mornings, round the outline of things.

I am rocked from side to side by the violence of my emotion.

Noi juc?m roluri diferite; dar suntem aceea?i.

She was writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own...

She came from the most worthless of classes - the rich, with a smattering of culture.

Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered

Milly Brush once might almost have fallen in love with these silences.

He was not afraid. At every moment Nature signified by some laughing hint like that gold spot which went round the wall--there, there, there--her determination to show, by brandishing her plumes, shaking her tresses, flinging her mantle this way and that, beautifully, always beautifully, and standing close up to breathe through her hollowed hands Shakespeare's words, her meaning.

As a matter of fact, this effort at discipline had been helped by the interests of a difficult profession, but the old conclusion to which Ralph had come when he left college still held sway in his mind, and tinged his views with the melancholy belief that life for most people compels the exercise of the lower gifts and wastes the precious ones, until it forces us to agree that there is little virtue, as well as little profit, in what once seemed to us the noblest part of our inheritance.

She had been trapped into saying something she did not mean.

to be engaged to marry some one with whom you are not in love is an inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is only a traveler's story brought from the heart of deep forests and told so rarely that wise people doubt whether the story can be true.