Virginia Woolf quotes - page 11

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin. (Virginia Woolf)
I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words. View quote
Virginia Woolf
But the close withdrew: the hand softened. It was over-- the moment. View quote
Virginia Woolf
The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging. View quote
Virginia Woolf
For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said. View quote
Virginia Woolf
For nothing was simply one thing. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Night had come-night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. View quote
Virginia Woolf
what she loved: life, London, this moment of June. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea. View quote
Virginia Woolf
It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on. (Virginia Woolf)
so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again... View quote
Virginia Woolf
As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall. View quote
Virginia Woolf
There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death... View quote
Virginia Woolf
I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls. View quote
Virginia Woolf
There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice. View quote
Virginia Woolf
It was enemies one wanted, not friends. View quote
Virginia Woolf
The merest schoolgirl [school girl, ] when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer [try to] describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. View quote
Virginia Woolf
For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it. View quote
Virginia Woolf
For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only. View quote
Virginia Woolf
We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life and speak the real language. (Virginia Woolf)
Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering? View quote
Virginia Woolf
In the past, the virtue of women's writing often lay in its divine spontaneity ... But it was also, and much more often, chattering and garrulous ... In future, granted time and books and a little space in the house for herself, literature will become for women, as for men, an art to be studied. Women's gift will be trained and strengthened. The novel will cease to be the dumping-ground for the personal emotions. It will become, more than at present, a work of art like any other, and its resources and its limitations will be explored. View quote
Virginia Woolf
In brain and insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this, and so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always most wished from everyone. View quote
Virginia Woolf
You are not listening to me. You are making phrases about Byron. And while you gesticulate, with your cloak, your cane, I am trying to expose a secret told to nobody yet; I am asking you (as I stand with my back to you) to take my life in your hands and tell me whether I am doomed always to cause repulsion in those I love? View quote
Virginia Woolf