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Virginia Woolf Quotes

English novelist, Birth: 25-1-1882 Virginia Woolf Quotes
1.
She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.
Virginia Woolf

She invites me to unleash my emotions like an unleashed torrent. She encourages me to explore the depths of my being; she quickly dispels terror. She allows illumination to come through.
2.
A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life
Virginia Woolf

A feminist is any female who candidly reveals her circumstances.
3.
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
Virginia Woolf

You cannot find contentment by shunning life.
4.
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
Virginia Woolf

One cannot contemplate well, adore well, slumber well, if one has not eaten heartily.
5.
Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.
Virginia Woolf

Similar Authors: Mark Twain C. S. Lewis Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Haruki Murakami Ayn Rand Charles Dickens George Eliot Albert Camus Kurt Vonnegut Victor Hugo Chuck Palahniuk Margaret Atwood Ernest Hemingway George R. R. Martin Jane Austen
6.
A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.
Virginia Woolf

A continually evolving self is one that remains alive.
7.
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
Virginia Woolf

8.
I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.
Virginia Woolf

Quote Topics by Virginia Woolf: Writing Thinking People Book Men Mind Heart Eye Reading Women Mean Art Life Hands World Light Dream Lying Beautiful Sea Giving Fall Voice Believe Running Order Reality Passion Two Sleep
9.
The only advice ... 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.
Virginia Woolf

10.
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
Virginia Woolf

11.
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
Virginia Woolf

12.
How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
Virginia Woolf

13.
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Virginia Woolf

14.
If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?
Virginia Woolf

15.
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
Virginia Woolf

16.
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
Virginia Woolf

17.
Language is wine upon the lips.
Virginia Woolf

18.
There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.
Virginia Woolf

19.
I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.
Virginia Woolf

20.
As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
Virginia Woolf

21.
The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.
Virginia Woolf

22.
I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices
Virginia Woolf

23.
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Virginia Woolf

24.
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
Virginia Woolf

25.
For nothing was simply one thing.
Virginia Woolf

26.
The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.
Virginia Woolf

27.
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
Virginia Woolf

28.
These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
Virginia Woolf

29.
I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin.
Virginia Woolf

30.
The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Virginia Woolf

31.
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
Virginia Woolf

32.
I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.
Virginia Woolf

33.
I am rooted, but I flow.
Virginia Woolf

34.
For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?
Virginia Woolf

35.
I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd.
Virginia Woolf

36.
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
Virginia Woolf

37.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Virginia Woolf

38.
But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.
Virginia Woolf

39.
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
Virginia Woolf

40.
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.
Virginia Woolf

41.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf

42.
Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you
Virginia Woolf

43.
But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.
Virginia Woolf

44.
Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.
Virginia Woolf

45.
He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.
Virginia Woolf

46.
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
Virginia Woolf

47.
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Virginia Woolf

48.
If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their sense. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. Humanity goes. Money making becomes so important that they must work by night as well as by day. Health goes. And so competitive do they become that they will not share their work with others though they have more themselves. What then remains of a human being who has lost sight, sound, and sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave.
Virginia Woolf

49.
No passion is stronger in the breast of a 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.
Virginia Woolf

50.
I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.
Virginia Woolf