Quotes from Virginia Woolf

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring, roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

London thou art a jewel of jewels, & jasper of jocunditie -- music, talk, friendship, city views, books, publishing, something central & inexplicable.

Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?—startling, unexpected, unknown?

At any rate, where books are concerned, it is notoriously difficult to fix labels of merit in such a way that they do not come off.

the only sign that Katharine gave of abstraction was to forget to help the pudding. She looked so like her mother, as she sat there oblivious of the tapioca

I have lived a thousand lives already. Every day I unbury--I dig up. I find relics of myself in the sand that women made thousands of years ago...

light and evanescent but held together by bolts of iron

And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed, one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.

insan doÄŸas? gereÄŸi, t?k nefesli, haz?r kravatl? ve iki haftad?r sakal t?ra?? olmayan küçük bir adamdan aÅŸa?? olduÄŸunun söylenmesinden hoÅŸlanm?yor.

Nothing exists outside us except a state of mind, he thinks; a desire for solace, for relief, for something outside these miserable pigmies, these feeble, these ugly, these craven men and women.

ÖrneÄŸin zenginler çoÄŸunlukla öfkelidirler, çünkü yoksullar?n onlar?n servetine göz diktiÄŸinden kuÅŸkulan?rlar.

Hide me, I cry, protect me, for I am the youngest, the most naked of you all. Jinny rides like a gull on the wave...but I...am broken into separate pieces; I am no longer one.

Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer!

As a child he had walked in Regent's Park—odd, he thought, hope the thought of childhood keeps coming back to me—the result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for 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.

la novela es como una telaraña ligada muy sutilmente, pero al fin y al cabo ligada a la vida por los cuatro costados.

With equal complacence she saw his misery, condoned his meanness, and acquiesced in his torture.

Her mind was like a wound exposed to dry in the air.

With the twelfth stroke of midnight, the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the city. All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The eighteenth century was over; the nineteenth century had begun.

All mists curl off the roof of my being.

No, delightful as the pastime of measuring be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

Sentia-se muito jovem; e, ao mesmo tempo, indizivelmente velha. Passava como uma navalha através de tudo; e ao mesmo tempo ficava de fora, olhando. Tinha a perpétua sensação, enquanto olhava os carros, de estar fora, longe e sozinha no meio do mar; sempre sentira que era muito, muito perigoso viver, por um só dia que fosse.

I knew he was angry by this token. When I read when he wrote about women I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself. 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 about women had he used indisputable proofs to establish his argument and had shown no trace of wishing that the result would be one thing rather than another, one would not have been angry either.

There they hang in the mind the shapes of the books we have read solidified by the judgments we have passed on them — Robinson Crusoe , Emma , The Return of the Native . Compare the novels with these – even the latest and least of novels has a right to be judged with the best.

Should this be the end of the story? a kind of sigh? a last ripple of the wave? A trickle of water to some gutter where, burbling, it dies away?