Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Novelist

Virginia Woolf was a British author known for her modernist literature and pioneering feminist ideas, particularly in 'Mrs. Dalloway' and 'A Room of One's Own'.

Writing Thinking People Book Men Mind
Born
January 25, 1882
Died
March 28, 1941
Quotes
817
Rank
#22

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Virginia Woolf quotes (page 22 of 41)

817 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

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"We are about to part," said Neville. "Here are the boxes; here are the cabs. There is Percival in his billycock hat. He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unaswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. I shall propose a meeting - under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait and he will not come. It is for that that I love him."

Dog Lying I Love Him
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"Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations."

Character People Feelings
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"All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side."

Sex School Feminist
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"He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a sparkle of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type."

Imagination Matter Way
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"I like the copious, shapeless, warm, not so very clever, but extremely easy and rather coarse aspect of things; the talk of men in clubs and public-houses; of miners half naked in drawers the forthright, perfectly unassuming, and without end in view except dinner, love, money and getting along tolerably; that which is without great hopes, ideals, or anything of that kind; what is unassuming except to make a tolerably, good job of it. I like all that."

Jobs Clever Men
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"There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice."

Voice Doubt Mind
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"My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry."

Children House Anxiety
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"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in."

Writing Attachment Play
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"The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme -- thinking too much."

Thinking Important Too Much
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"By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream"

Dream Travel Book
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"I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases."

Phrases Wander Single Word
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"So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison."

Writing Sacrifice Hair
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"Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces."

Nature Tears Together
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"Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world."

Luck World May
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"But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing."

Solitude Undoing
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"To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?"

World Facts Whole
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"The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass"

Real Home Leaves Of Grass
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"For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did."

Morning Sight Years
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