Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 3

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees
and changing leaves.

Life stand still here.

First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

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

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure

Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?

Like" and "like" and "like"-but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?

No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.

No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.

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)

Septimus has been working too hard" - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.

Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins-of happiness and unhappiness.

About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

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.

When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.

Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.

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.