Virginia Woolf quotes - page 13

But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets. (Virginia Woolf)
Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Directly the mulberry tree begins to make you circle, break off. Pelt the tree with laughter. View quote
Virginia Woolf
What she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here there, she survived. Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself. View quote
Virginia Woolf
An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw? View quote
Virginia Woolf
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic. View quote
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. View quote
Virginia Woolf
This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. View quote
Virginia Woolf
It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work. View quote
Virginia Woolf
This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say. (Virginia Woolf)
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. View quote
Virginia Woolf
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. View quote
Virginia Woolf
A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back. View quote
Virginia Woolf
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph. View quote
Virginia Woolf
It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied? View quote
Virginia Woolf
Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders. View quote
Virginia Woolf
If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share. View quote
Virginia Woolf
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)
You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say. View quote
Virginia Woolf
If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully? View quote
Virginia Woolf