Search quotes

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 ▲ ▼

Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
12c1473	But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.		nature russia	Virginia Woolf
6d491ac	Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it wi..		friends life	Virginia Woolf
0afd581	Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.			Virginia Woolf
74a0ddb	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 ..			Virginia Woolf
0c2c44f	This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This i..		giving-up	Virginia Woolf
eee322b	There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.		life	Virginia Woolf
9909fee	But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them.			Virginia Woolf
31aa6b6	It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.		poems poetry	Virginia Woolf
4e00e64	The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the features from faces. People might walk through me. And what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar - forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel; our short progress has been cancelled. I think a..			Virginia Woolf
f998c18	But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.			Virginia Woolf
608cfae	But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful...			Virginia Woolf
4d6c050	Let me pull myself out of these waters. But they heap themselves on me; they sweep me between their great shoulders; I am turned; I am tumbled; I am stretched, among these long lights, these long waves, these endless paths, with people pursuing, pursuing.			Virginia Woolf
d497c5e	Her eyes are pure stars, and her fingers, if they touch you, freeze you to the bone.			Virginia Woolf
c0b2b7e	Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent.			Virginia Woolf
5fc33af	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.			Virginia Woolf
a2014ec	Thoughts are divine.			Virginia Woolf
ac55bd3	Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jaques--literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature ..			Virginia Woolf
0a6be10	Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.			Virginia Woolf
a275087	That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.			Virginia Woolf
707eb34	Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waves swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.		sadness crying	Virginia Woolf
253f48e	However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then? and there came to my mind's eye one of those long streets somewhere south of the river whose infinite rows are innumerably populated. With the eye of the imagination I saw a very ancient lady crossing the street on the arm of a middle-aged woman, her daughter, perhap..		women writing	Virginia Woolf
cb5e2c1	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.		egotism worry thinking	Virginia Woolf
076df25	Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying "that is all" more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, ..		inspirational	Virginia Woolf
bdcabc0	What if I told you I'm incapable of tolerating my own heart?			Virginia Woolf
35d95a0	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.		writing	Virginia Woolf
72c0902	A million candles burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one			Virginia Woolf
bacb7f4	If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance (...); as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as points out [in his ], she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.		stereotypes woman equality fiction truth clichés greatness dignity importance hypocrisy respect gender	Virginia Woolf
b89dc3e	The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness		sleep sea	Virginia Woolf
c068351	If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?		shakespeare	Virginia Woolf
79efde2	Nothing could be slow enough, nothing lasts too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Barton when they were all talking, to look at the sky; seen it between peoples shoulders at dinner; seen it i..			Virginia Woolf
ff3e334	Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.			Virginia Woolf
b4e8668	We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.			Virginia Woolf
d28aee1	So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball			Virginia Woolf
5ce591e	Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated b..			Virginia Woolf
9d5c58e	Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.			Virginia Woolf
a597803	Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.		writing authors readers	Virginia Woolf
aa18516	Well, we must wait for the future to show.		patience	Virginia Woolf
cc2f1ee	Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. 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.		books used-books bookstores	Virginia Woolf
c24ea57	it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized. Brilliant and effecti..		writing gender-identity gender	Virginia Woolf
ad15d1a	If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don't admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don't do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.		sadness modernity	Virginia Woolf
02f767b	My belief is that if we live another century or so -- I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals -- and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in re..		hope shakespeare-s-sister virginia-woolf	Virginia Woolf
bafce09	If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?		romance	Virginia Woolf
06ef0fe	Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry...			Virginia Woolf
adbc400	I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.		reading treasure	Virginia Woolf

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 ▲ ▼