"It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road."
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Quote collection
Virginia Woolf quotes (page 27 of 41)
817 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once."
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"In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality."
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"Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?"
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"In the 18th century we knew how everything was done, but here I rise through the air, I listen to voices in America, I see men flying- but how is it done? I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns."
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"Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred."
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"Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them."
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"I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends."
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"I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else."
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"So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood, - by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know."
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"But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love."
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"... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bullyher, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured."
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"I find that when I've seen a certain number of people my mind becomes like an old match box -- the part one strikes on, I mean."
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"Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day"
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"Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall"
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"Only longing can fill with more of itself."
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"Wind and storm colored July. Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather. I was wafted down tunnels. Then very gingerly, I pushed my foot across. I laid my hand against a brick wall. I returned very painfully, drawing myself back into my body over the grey, cadaverous space of the puddle. This is life then to which I am committed."
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"Love ought to stop on both sides, don’t you think, simultaneously?’ He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake the sleepers. ‘But it won’t - that’s the devil,’ he added in the same undertone."
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"They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought."
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"The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride."
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