Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Her hand cut a trail in the sea, as her mind made the green swirls and streaks into patterns and, numbed and shrouded, wandered in imagination in that underworld of waters were the pearls stuck in clusters to white sprays, where in the green light a change came over one's entire mind and one's body shine half transparent enveloped in a green cloak.

Finché scrivete ciò che desiderate scrivere, questo è tutto ciò che conta.

Chloe liked Olivia,' I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature.

All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point — a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

La historia de la oposición de los hombres a la emancipación de las mujeres es más interesante quizá que el relato de la emancipación misma.

I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment" (Diary 2: 213).

he truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.

I use my friends rather as giglamps : There's another field I see: by your light. Over there's a hill. I widen my landscape.

There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

The great revelation had never come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

Now it was time to move, and, as a woman gathers her things together, her cloak, her gloves, her opera-glasses, and gets up to go out of the theatre into the street, she rose from the sofa and went to Peter.

Parties, he said, bored him—such were English aristocrats before marriage with intellect had adulterated the fine singularity of their minds.

We suffered terribly as we became separate bodies.

Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping. If not, you will of course throw the whole of it into the wastepaper basket and forget all about it.

He was to be the son of her old age; the limb of her infirmity; the oak tree on which she leant her degradation.

when the memoir writer has done his work upon it? For one thing, Orlando had a positive hatred of tea; for another, the intellect, divine as it is, and all-worshipful, has a habit of lodging in the most seedy of carcases, and often, alas, acts the cannibal among the other faculties so that often, where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass

Virtually all the characters in the novel have failed to live up to their early dreams and ambitions.

and thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge.

In the same way once a book is printed and published it ceases to be the property of the author; he commits it to the care of other people;

Tâchons de croire que la vie est un objet solide, un globe que nous pouvons faire tourner sous nos doigts. Tâchons de croire qu'on peut faire un récit simple et logique, en finir avec l'amour, par exemple, et passer au chapitre suivant.

I have been longing for inner consistency.

The weekly creak and screech of brains rinsed in cold water and wrung dry

Dick, you're better than I am said Clarissa. You see all around, where I only see there she pressed a point on the back of his hand That's my business, as I tried to explain at dinner. What I like about you, Dick, is that you're always the same, and I'm a creature of moods. You're a pretty creature anyhow he said, gazing at her with deeper eyes. You think so, do you? Then kiss me.