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Virginia Woolf Quotes

Writer

Virginia Woolf, a pioneering modernist writer, explored the depths of human consciousness and the nuances of everyday life with eloquence and insight. Her quotes reflect her keen observations on creativity, identity, and the human experience. Together, they offer timeless inspiration for introspection, self-expression, and the pursuit of intellectual and emotional depth.

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The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
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Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!
From Mrs. Dalloway
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She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
From To the Lighthouse
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And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
From The Waves
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Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.
From The Waves
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When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.
From Jacob's Room
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Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.
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Death is woven in with the violets,” said Louis. “Death and again death.”)
From The Waves
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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
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When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
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I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
From Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing
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There it was before her - life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.
From To the Lighthouse
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For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.
From The Waves
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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?
From Orlando
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Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
From Orlando
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For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.
From Orlando
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Septimus has been working too hard" - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.
From Mrs. Dalloway
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She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!
From To the Lighthouse
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So life fills my veins. So life pours through my limbs. So I am driven forward, till I could cry, as I move from dawn to dusk opening and shutting, 'No more. I am glutted with natural happiness.
From The Waves
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Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
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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 is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.
From The Waves
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Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure
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in this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow... (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house & grounds)
From To the Lighthouse
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And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees
and changing leaves.
From To the Lighthouse
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!
From Mrs. Dalloway
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
From To the Lighthouse
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
From The Waves
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.
From The Waves
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.
From Jacob's Room
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is woven in with the violets,” said Louis. “Death and again death.”)
From The Waves
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
From Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There it was before her - life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.
From To the Lighthouse
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.
From The Waves
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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?
From Orlando
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
From Orlando
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.
From Orlando
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Septimus has been working too hard" - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.
From Mrs. Dalloway
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!
From To the Lighthouse
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
So life fills my veins. So life pours through my limbs. So I am driven forward, till I could cry, as I move from dawn to dusk opening and shutting, 'No more. I am glutted with natural happiness.
From The Waves
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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 is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.
From The Waves
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
in this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow... (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house & grounds)
From To the Lighthouse
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees
and changing leaves.
From To the Lighthouse
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!
From Mrs. Dalloway
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
From To the Lighthouse
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
From The Waves
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.
From The Waves
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.
From Jacob's Room
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Death is woven in with the violets,” said Louis. “Death and again death.”)
From The Waves
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
From Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
There it was before her - life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.
From To the Lighthouse
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.
From The Waves
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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?
From Orlando
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
From Orlando
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.
From Orlando
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Septimus has been working too hard" - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.
From Mrs. Dalloway
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!
From To the Lighthouse
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
So life fills my veins. So life pours through my limbs. So I am driven forward, till I could cry, as I move from dawn to dusk opening and shutting, 'No more. I am glutted with natural happiness.
From The Waves
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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 is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.
From The Waves
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
in this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow... (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house & grounds)
From To the Lighthouse
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees
and changing leaves.
From To the Lighthouse
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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