Virginia Woolf quotes - page 2

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in. (Virginia Woolf)
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. View quote
Virginia Woolf
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. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works. View quote
Virginia Woolf
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Language is wine upon the lips. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women. View quote
Virginia Woolf
It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. (Virginia Woolf)
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. View quote
Virginia Woolf
I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. View quote
Virginia Woolf
The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body? View quote
Virginia Woolf
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order. View quote
Virginia Woolf
They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort. (Virginia Woolf)
The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare. View quote
Virginia Woolf
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. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Last Words in a Suicide note 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. View quote
Virginia Woolf
But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least in the nineteenth century, another characteristic which may be traced to the writer's sex. In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer's character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman's presence - of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights. View quote
Virginia Woolf