Quotes About Virginia Woolf

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

Her mind was like her room, in which lights advanced and retreated, came pirouetting and stepping delicately, spread their tails, pecked their way; and then her whole being was suffused, like the room again, with a cloud of some profound knowledge, some unspoken regret, and then she was full of locked drawers, stuffed with letters, like her cabinets.

Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one's perceptions, half way to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh?

the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string

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

It sharpened, it refined them, the yellow-blue evening light; and on the leaves in the square shone lurid, livid - they looked as if dipped in sea water - the foliage of a submerged city.

I'm convinced people are wrong when they say it's work that wears one; it's responsibility.

There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional) a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals.

It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories. It is far pleasanter than writing reviews of famous novels.

I almost envied him the possession of this modest and clear flame.

Cierra con llave tus bibliotecas, si quieres, pero no hay barrera, cerradura, ni cerrojo que puedas imponer a la libertad de mi mente.

The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches.

She walked with Bertram; she walked rather like a stag, with a little give of the ankles, fanning herself, majestic, silent, with all her senses roused, her ears pricked, snuffing the air, as if she had been some wild, but perfectly controlled creature taking its pleasure by night.

Good-morning to you, Clarissa!

But whatever effect discouragement and criticism had upon their writing—and I believe that they had a very great effect

She lacks mystery; and the charm people have who withdraw, and don't care to coin their views. One figures her always in flight; so much determined to embrace everything that she fails.

The word 'time' split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable, words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time.

Virginia Woolf had to ask herself "How can one weigh and shape dialogue till each sentence tears the shingles in the bottom of the reader's soul?

A steel-blue plume from one of them fell among the heather. She loved wild birds' feathers. She had used to collect them as a boy. She picked it up and stuck it in her hat.

And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect, thought Clarissa, watching him open the door; for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from one's husband, without losing one's independence, one's self-respect—something, after all, priceless.

Would that we might spare the reader what is to come and say to him in so many words, Orlando died and was buried. But here, alas, Truth, Candour, and Honesty, the austere Gods, who keep watch and ward by the inkpot of the biographer, cry No!

By conviction an atheist perhaps, he is taken by surprise with moments of extraordinary exaltation. Nothing

There are perhaps more of the qualities that matter among the ignorant then among the learned. But again, what a vile thing the rabble is!

Qué derecho tenían los Bradshaw a hablar de muerte en su fiesta? Se había matado, sí, pero ¿cómo? El cuerpo de Clarissa siempre lo revivía, en el primer instante, bruscamente, cuando le contaban un accidente; se le inflamaba el vestido, le ardía el cuerpo.