Quotes from Virginia Woolf

All these ancestors and centuries, and silver and gold, have bred a perfect body. She is stag like, or race horse like, save for the face, which pouts, and has no very sharp brain. But as a body hers is perfection. So many rare and curious objects hit one's brain like pellets which perhaps unfold later. But it's the breeding of Vita's that I took away with me as an impression, carrying her and Knole in my eye [...]

Divinamente hermoso es también divinamente despiadado.

Zira kad?n hakikat? söylemeye baÅŸlarsa, aynadaki suret küçülür durur; erkeÄŸin hayatla uyumu bozuluverir. Erkek kendini sabah iki kat daha büyük göremedikten sonra art?k nas?l kararlar verebilecek, nas?l yerlileri medenileÅŸtirebilecek, nas?l kanunlar ç?karabilecek, nas?l kitaplar yazabilecek, nas?l giyinip kuÅŸan?p ziyafetlerde ahkam kesebilecektir?

The future of civilisation lies in the hands of young men with their love of abstract principles; getting books sent out to them all the way from London to a peak in the Himalayas; reading science; reading philosophy.

cuál es el estado mental más propicio al acto de creación?, me pregunté. ¿Puede uno formarse una idea del estado mental que favorece y hace posible esta extraña actividad?

The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me.

The weight, the pace, the stride of a man's mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully. The ape is too distant to be sedulous.

Es preciso que el dedo de la muerte se pose en el tumulto de la vida de vez en cuando para que no nos haga pedazos? ¿Estamos conformados de tal manera que diariamente necesitamos minúsculas dosis de muerte para ejercer el oficio de vivir?

The early train from the north is hurled at her like a missile. We draw a curtain as we pass. Blank expectant faces stare at us as we rattle and flash through stations. Men clutch their newspapers a little tighter, as our wind sweeps them, envisaging death. But we roar on. We are about to explode in the flanks of the city like a shell in the side of some ponderous, maternal, majestic animal.

Quinientos a la semana y una puerta con pestillo.

One of these days d'you think you'll be able to see things at the end of the telephone? Peggy said, getting up.

As summer neared, as the evenings lengthened, there came to the wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the strangest kind--of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind...

Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us.

Is it permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies ow men will think of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?

C'est pourquoi je hais les miroirs qui me montrent mon vrai visage. Seule, je tombe souvent dans le néant. Je dois poser le pied prudemment sur le rebord du monde, de peur de tomber dans le néant. Je suis forcée de me cogner la tête contre une porte bien dure, pour me contraindre à rentrer dans mon propre corps.»

She could not imagine Peter or Richard taking the trouble to give a party for no reason whatever.

El dinero dignifica lo que es frívolo si no está pagado.

If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?

she makes me feel as if language is miserably insufficient. broken.

Es curioso advertir que, en toda crisis, siempre aparece una frase incongruente que insiste en acudir en nuestro auxilio.

she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.