Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Ainda assim não conseguiu dizer nada; o horizonte inteiro parecia despido de qualquer possível objeto de comentário.

The kitchen table was something visionary, austere; something bare, hard, not ornamental. There was no colour to it; it was all edges and angles; it was uncompromisingly plain.

know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.

It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose.

De vreme ce apariÈ›iile noastre, adic? partea din noi care apare, sunt atât de trec?toare, comparate cu cealalt?, partea nev?zut? din noi, care se întinde departe, înseamn? c? partea nev?zut? poate supravieÈ›ui, poate fi cumva recuperat?, ataÈ™at? unei persoane sau alteia, sau poate chiar bântui anumite locuri, dup? moarte.

I always have such need to merely talk to you. Even when I have nothing to talk about – with you I just seem to go right ahead and sort of invent it. I invent it for you. Because I never seem to run out of tenderness for you and because I need to feel you near. Excuse the bad writing and excuse the emotional overflow. What I mean to say, perhaps, is that, in a way, I am never empty of you; not for a moment, an instant, a single second.

A imensa autopiedade dele, sua exigência de compaixão jorrava e se espraiava em poças aos pés dela, e a única coisa que ela fazia, miserável pecadora que era, era arrepanhar um pouco a saia em volta dos tornozelos para não se molhar.

To be loved by Susan would be to be impaled by a bird's sharp beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door. Yet there are moments when I could wish to be speared by a beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door, positively, once and for all.

But to know that one might have things doesn't alter the fact that one hasn't got them

What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech-and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Picadilly.

Yet five minutes after she had passed the statue of Achilles she had the rapt look of one brushing through crowds on a summer's afternoon, when the trees are rustling, the wheels churning yellow, and the tumult of the present seems like an elegy for past youth and past summers, and there rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if time and eternity showed through skirts and waistcoats, and she saw people passing tragically to destruction.

Es tan duro de matar un fantasma como una realidad.

How strange to feel the line that is spun from us lengthening its fine filament across the misty spaces of the intervening world

Continuerò ad azzardare, a cambiare, ad aprire la mente e gli occhi, rifiutando di lasciarmi incasellare e stereotipare. Ciò che conta è liberare il proprio io: lasciare che trovi le sue dimensioni, che non abbia vincoli.

These details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person. Images, metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted in his mind. He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device - a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past.

To know the truth—to accept without bitterness

The red carnation that stood in the vase on the table of the restaurant when we dined together with Percival is become a six-sided flower; made of six lives

If I have to wait, I read; if I wake in the night, I feel along the shelf for a book. Swelling, perpetually augmented, there is a vast accumulation of unrecorded matter in my head.

But cricket was no mere game. Cricket was important. [S]he could never help reading about cricket. [S]he read the scores in the stop press first, then how it was a hot day; then about a murder case.

She burnt like a dead white star.

women live much more in the past than we do, he thought. They attach themselves to places; and their fathers – a woman's always proud of her father.

You are you. That is what consoles me for the lack of many things.

We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver.