Quotes About Virginia Woolf

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension.

For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.

her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it

I begin to be impatient of solitude - to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me.

This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs, but the violent jolt of the Capital, that is my choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity. I wish, for your sake, Leonard, I could be happy in this quietness. [pause]But if it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death..

That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library.

She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose.

And that's the end," she said, and she saw in his eyes, as the interest of the story died away in them, something else take its place; something wondering, pale, like the reflection of a light, which at once made him gaze and marvel. Turning, she looked across the bay, and there, sure enough, coming regularly across the waves first two quick strokes and then one long steady stroke, was the light of the Lighthouse. It had been lit. -To The Lighthouse.

The novel is the medium which makes it possible for people of ordinary intelligence to communicate their ideas to the world.

The sweetness of this content overflowing runs down the walls of my mind, and liberates understanding.

Oh, yes, dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair.

But this question of love... this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had that not, after all, been love?

The only advise, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I fell at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fatter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can posses.

Communication is health; communication is happiness. Communication, he muttered. 'What are you saying, Septimus?' Rezia asked, wild with terror, for he was talking to himself.

Oh, but nonsense, she thought; William must marry Lily. They have so many things in common. Lily is so fond of flowers. They are both cold and aloof and rather self-sufficing. She must arrange for them to take a long walk together.

It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue

George Eliot makes us share their lives, not in a spirit of condescension or of curiosity, but in a spirit of sympathy. She is no satirist....But she gathers in her large grasp a great bunch of the main elements of human nature and groups them loosely together with a tolerant understanding which, as one finds upon re-reading, has not only kept her figures fresh and free, but has given them an unexpected hold upon our laughter and tears.

the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

It was the present moment. No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her heart, and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment?

She raised a little mountain for the ants to climb over. She reduced them to a frenzy of indecision by this interference in their cosmogony. Some ran this way, others that.

The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.

What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

But suppose Peter said to her, Yes, yes, but your parties—what's the sense of your parties? all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They're an offering; which sounded horribly vague. But