Quotes from Virginia Woolf

oh, they had to go before the end they had to be back at ten

Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.

There it was, all round them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity.

Y el poema me parece que sólo es tu voz hablando.

For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disseverment, and are trying to communicate, but when communication is established they fall silent.

it struck her, this was tragedy-- not palls, dust, and the shroud; but children coerced, their spirits subdued.

She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup. as if there was an eddy--there--and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it.

The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning.

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet.

it was impossible to dislike any one if one looked at them.

How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?

What people had shed and left--a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes--those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again.

We have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal in the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print.

thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

You were given a sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain..; yet in absence, in the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent, let you touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel of it and understanding, after years of lying lost.

As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend, written around the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England...

In all the books love is one of the great facts that mould human life. But it is a catastrophe: it happens suddenly and overwhelmingly, and there is little to be said about it.

What one wants in the person one lives with is that they should keep one at one's best.

and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction

she heard some voice saying she couldn't paint, saying she couldn't create, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them.

She raised a little mountain for the ants to climb over. She reduced them to a frenzy of indecision by this interference in their cosmogony. Some ran this way, others that.

The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her usual robust health and was seen by onlookers to turn visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs as the icy blast struck her at the street corner.

After all, we are not responsible. We are not judges. We are not called upon to torture our fellows with thumb-screws and irons; we are not called upon to mount pulpits and lecture them on pale Sunday afternoons. It is better to look at a rose, or to read Shakespeare as I read him here in Shaftesbury Avenue.