"So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball"
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Quote collection
Virginia Woolf quotes (page 38 of 41)
817 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It doesn't have to be the truth, just your vision of it, written down."
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"For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, "This is what I have made of it! This!" And what had she made of it? What, indeed?"
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"You cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind."
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"I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement."
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"Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference."
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"He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash and hush of the sea."
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"I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said."
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"Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become."
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"Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise."
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"How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?"
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"Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough."
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"O how blessed it would be never to marry, or grow old; but to spend one's life innocently and indifferently among the trees and rivers which alone can keep one cool and childlike in the midst of the troubles of the world!"
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"First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air."
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"The root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty."
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"There was no treachery too base for the world to commit."
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"Anecdote: A house that is rooted to one spot but can travel as quickly as you change your mind and is complete in itself is surely the most desirable of houses. Our modern house with its cumbersome walls and its foundations planted deep in the ground is nothing better than a prison and more and more prison like does it become the longer we live there, and wear fetters of a association and sentiment."
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"For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said."
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"Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For 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."
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"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."
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