Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote

The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman's grace.

Qué enemigo percibimos ahora avanzando hacia nosotros, tú, sobre quien ahora cabalgo, mientras piafamos en este pavimento? Es la muerte. La muerte es el enemigo. Es la muerte contra la que cabalgo, lanza en ristre y melena al viento, como un hombre joven, como Percival cuando galopaba en la India. Pico espuelas. ¡Contra ti me lanzaré, entero e invicto, oh Muerte!

Orlando had become a woman—there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity.

It is only that I want to be with you and not with anybody else - but you would get bored if I go on saying this, only it comes back and back till it drips of my pen.

Down there among the roots where the flowers decayed, gusts of dead smells were wafted; drops formed on the bloated sides of swollen things. The skin of rotten fruit broke, and matter oozed too thick to run.

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.

But how describe the world seen without a self?

passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.

Now glancing this side, that side, they looked deeper, beneath the flowers, down the dark avenues into the unlit world where the leaf rots and the flower has fallen.

las mujeres y la novela son dos problemas que no he resuelto.

Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust: dogs and nature.

I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it; fame and missed it; love and not known it; life--behold, death is better. I have known many men and women, she continued: none have I understood.

I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for someone to wear them.

Todos acudían a ella, lógicamente, puesto que era mujer; venían a lo largo del día con esto y lo de más allá; uno quería una cosa, otro, otra; a menudo le parecía no ser más que una esponja empapada al máximo en emociones humanas.

The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility.

Far away a bell tolls, but not for death. There are bells that ring for life. A leaf falls, from joy. Oh, I am in love with life!

For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say 'good to eat' when they mean 'beautiful' and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.

she let it uphold her and sustain her, this admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence, which ran up and down, crossed this way and that, like iron girders spanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world, so that she could trust herself to it utterly, even shut her eyes, or flicker them for a moment, as a child staring up from its pillow winks at the myriad layers of the leaves of a tree. Then she woke up. It was still being fabricated.

She was haunted by the ghosts of phrases. She gave herself up to a sensual delight in the combinations of words. She sought them in the pages of her favorite authors.

J'ai un faible pour les gens qui ne se décident pas à commencer quelque chose.

Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.

She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself.