Quotes About Virginia Woolf

A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.

When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.

Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.

Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.

They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than any words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.

I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.

Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.

And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power, as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.

I need someone whose mind falls like a chopper on a block; to whom the pitch of absurdity is sublime, and a shoestring adorable. To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?

All the time she writing the world had continued.

It is equally vain," she thought, "for you to think you can protect me, or for me to think I can worship you. The light of truth beats upon us without shadow, and the light of truth is damnably unbecoming to us both.

It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred...

The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be, and deserves fuller investigation.

I should never be able to fulfill what is,I understand, the first duty of a lecturer-to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever.

I am the guardian of the sleeping fawn; the snow is dear to me; and the moon rising; and the silver sea.

It was some such feeling of completeness perhaps which, ten years ago, standing almost where she stood now, had made her say that she must be in love with the place. Love had a thousand shapes. There might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays.

My spine is soft like wax near the flame of the candle. I dream; I dream.

She was singing] a senseless singsong, so that several park keepers looked at her with suspicion and were only brought to a favorable opinion of her sanity by noticing the pearl necklace she wore.

Let us turn over the pages, and I will add, for your amusement, a comment in the margin.

Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of darkness.

Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English!

I had tea. I then spent a long time in a bookshop. A quiet evening.