Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 5

What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?

The only advice … that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one.

Human relations, at least between the sexes, were carried on as relations between countries are now - with ambassadors, and treaties. The parties concerned met on the great occasion of the proposal. If this were refused, a state of war was declared.

But china is seldom thrown from a great height; it is one of the rarest of human actions. You have to find in conjunction a very high house, and a woman of such reckless impulse and passionate prejudice that she flings her jar or pot straight from the window without thought of who is below.

(But he could not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words.)

Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time’s clock with one blow. Come closer.

They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.

What is nobler," she mused, turning over the photographs, "than to be a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty?

Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these – ‘Chloe liked Olivia…’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.

When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.

Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.

I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.

I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.

Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.

When you are silent you are again beautiful.