Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Our hands touch, our bodies burst into fire. The chair, the cup, the table-nothing remains unlit. All quivers, all kindles, all burns clear.

Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall... Here is something definite, something real. thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is proof of some existence other than ours.

But if one day you do not come after breakfast, if one day I see you in some looking-glass perhaps looking after another, if the telephone buzzes and buzzes in your empty room, I shall then, after unspeakable anguish, I shall then - for there is no end to the folly of the human heart - seek another, find another, you.

But however small it was [the thought], it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind -put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still.

We are the words; we are the music...

Avete idea di quanti libri si scrivono sulle donne in un anno? Avete idea di quanti sono scritti da uomini? Sapete di essere l'animale forse più discusso dell'universo?

When an arguer argues dispassionately, he thinks only of the argument, and the reader cannot help thinking of the argument too. If he had written dispassionately...had used indisputable proofs to establish his argument and had shown no trace of wishing that the result should be one would thing rather than another, one would not have been angry either. One would have accepted the fact as one accepts that a pea is green or a canary yellow.

These old houses are only brick and wood, soaked in human sweat, grained with human dirt.

Untuk menikmati kebebasan kita harus mengendalikan diri sendiri.

The flowers have come, and are adorable, dusky, tortured, passionate like you.

Es esta una de las torturas y desgracias de la vida: cuando son incapaces nuestros amigos de terminar sus cuentos.

I think sometimes [...] I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn

La bellezza del mondo ha due tagli, uno di gioia, l'altro d'angoscia, e taglia in due il cuore.

Books, she thought, grew of themselves.

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?—the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world—a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.

Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in a chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced, genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs Rigby and Lowndes to give the information gratis, that is was half-past one.

I am suspended between life and death in an unfamiliar way

They neither work nor weep; in their shape is their reason.

Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched, their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England.

I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction.

Jane Austen) is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.

Nothing should be named lest by so doing we change it

For I am the weakest, the youngest of them all. I am a child looking at his feet and the little runnels that the stream has made in the gravel. That is a snail, I say; that is a leaf. I delight in the snails; I delight in the leaf. I am always the youngest, the most innocent, the most trustful. You are all protected. I am naked

and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody.