Photographic portrait, 1902George Charles Beresford; restoration by Adam Cuerden · Public domain

488 collected words

Virginia Woolf

Life dates: 1882 AD — 1941 AD

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01c. 1911 AD

For ourselves, who are ordinary men and women, let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every one of the senses she has given us.

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02c. 1911 AD

I am extremely happy walking on the downs...I like to have space to spread my mind out in.

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03c. 1911 AD

and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower-roses, carnations, irises, lilac-glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!

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04c. 1911 AD

(June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that.)

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05c. 1911 AD

It partook ... of eternity ... there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.

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06c. 1911 AD

But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.

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07c. 1911 AD

So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball

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08c. 1911 AD

With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes -- one of the tragedies of married life.

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09c. 1911 AD

She was married, true; but if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.

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10c. 1911 AD

They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did.

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11c. 1911 AD

Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.

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12c. 1911 AD

The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful.

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13c. 1911 AD

What I value is the naked contact of a mind.

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14c. 1911 AD

... All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age ... when the writer used both sides of his mind [the male and female sides of his mind] equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoy.

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15c. 1911 AD

The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long life seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. ..

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16c. 1911 AD

I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

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17c. 1911 AD

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

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18c. 1911 AD

What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech-and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Picadilly.

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19c. 1911 AD

The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.

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20c. 1911 AD

What she liked was simply life. "That's what i did it for," she said, speaking aloud to life... Could any man understand what she meant, either, about life? …But to go deeper, beneath what people said, and these judgments, how superficial, how fragmentary, they are. In her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? It was an offering…it was her gift.

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21c. 1911 AD

Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.

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22c. 1911 AD

No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he had cut out - a refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress - children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed.

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23c. 1911 AD

What was she dreaming about, Mrs. Ramsay wondered, seeing her engrossed, as she stood there, with some thought of her own, so that she had to repeat the message twice––ask Mildred if Andrew, Miss Doyle, and Mr. Rayley have come back?––The words seemed to be dropped into a well, where, if the waters were clear, they were also so extraordinarily distorting that, even as they descended, one saw them twisting about to make Heaven knows what pattern on the floor of the child's mind.

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24c. 1911 AD

...it struck her, this was tragedy-- not palls, dust, and the shroud; but children coerced, their spirits subdued.

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