But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.
Virginia Woolf
Related I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ... KELLY JONES Murakami's characters sense the potential liquification and destruction of everything. The aftershoc... FRANK GALATI There is nothing beyond God, and the sense enjoyments are simply something through which we are pass... SWAMI VIVEKANANDA The objects are very beautiful and important in and of themselves, but also because of the story the... DAVID SILVERMAN The chances are greater than zero, but not much. Regardless of who's asking for an injunction, the c... WILLIAM KOVACIC You've never really trusted him, though you don't understand why. Something about the fact that he's... N.K. JEMISIN I don't have a very quick sense of humor. FLORENZ ZIEGFELD This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of Philosophers, I forbore to descri... ISAAC NEWTON Some people are very family-oriented and reserve units are in their communities, whereas regular arm... DAVID RUDD There is something very intriguing about, for example, the sense of accomplishment that a small chil... PETER GAY Vimes took the view that life was so full of things happening erratically in all directions that the... TERRY PRATCHETT By repeating sounds over and over again, I lose sense of time, space, and ego, and I get to just vib... SOPHIE HAWLEY-WELD We each are artists of the self, creating a collage -- a new and original work of art -- out of scra... JUDITH VIORST There's also some element of coming of age during the Reagan administration, which everybody has... JOHN CUSACK I suppose there's a melancholy tone at the back of the American mind, a sense of something lost.... GEORGE WILL Coordinating there Events and objects with remote events And vanished objects. Making orna... VLADIMIR NABOKOV For though we very truly hear that the kingdom of God will be filled with splendor, joy, happiness a... JOHN CALVIN People debate over whether or not there is a literal Hell, in the literal sense often described as f... CRISS JAMI Chances of survival of many of our injured cadres are indeed remote as there is no medical support a... KUGHALO MULATONU We're all just passing time and occupy our chair very briefly. JOHN HURT There is no greater glory than to die for love. GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nasti... GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. S... GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ [When Gershwin premiered] Rhapsody in Blue, ... too spontaneous, that it created formal gaps. And it... JOHN PICKETT Be kind. We never know what people are going through. Give grace and mercy because one day your circ... GERMANY KENT It's such a long fire and the head of the fire is in a very remote and a hard area, EDWARD CALLAHAN WikiLeaks, for me, has not only that element in it of journalism publishing, but also the way in whi... SARAH HARRISON The idea of having pride, the idea of manners, I think is very, very important. There's just too lit... BILL BIXBY No one should let yesterday use up too much of today. Easy to say, hard to live. ANDREA HAIRSTON Good design for the home should be universal. A house should be like old shoes, comfortable, like a ... ELSA PERETTI Clay in the hands of a good potter suffers so many good turns, but in the end, we see its real and t... ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH It's an adventure. I mean I spent a lot of time in the Himalayas and over the years have come to kno... JOE ROHDE We don't make very good decisions sometimes. We start forcing things and then it's over. We just don... DARIN LEE Everybody prays whether you think of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when someth... FREDERICK BUECHNER Without guidance and support for patients and families approaching death, there may be unnecessary c... LISA J. SHULTZ Even the largest of the global companies often have hundreds of remote locations that have just a fe... ARUN TANEJA Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without ... MARTIN HEIDEGGER To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants—... ALDO LEOPOLD She has always said that talking makes everyone feel better. He says talking is the equivalent of gr... COLIN MCADAM I grew up in a very small town which is remote even by Indian standards. I always dreamed of the wor... MIRA NAIR Everybody prays whether [you think] of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when some... FREDERICK BUECHNER When a man is struggling for his life, and groups and people are passing all sorts of judgments, it'... MALCOLM HEDDING In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about... ROMESH GUNESEKERA You're still lovely," Mor said a bit gently. Elain offered a half smile. "I suppose that war m... SARAH J. MAAS No one would want to read a book in which I explain the science of cloning because it would be very ... RACHEL COHN In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of p... ANAïS NIN In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has... NOAM CHOMSKY The more God is glorified the more man is energic and the more satan is weak. INDONESIA123 We are near, very near, to an end to the eurozone crisis... The worst - in the sense of the fear of ... FRANCOIS HOLLANDE We played with intensity. We were beating them to the ball tonight. I was very happy with their play... EUGENE DORO Avoid the temptation to force a moment so you won’t miss the one with your name on it. GINA GREENLEE For starters, that’s a rather simple principle of Time Travel right there – and according to the... CHRISTINA ENGELA Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have... JOHN MASEFIELD I am not a man of my time. In fact I find it hard not to declare myself its enemy. Not, as I often r... JOSEPH ROTH In a sense, 'American Pie' was a very despairing song but it can also be seen as very hopeful. DON MCLEAN We are passing through a very sensitive time, and on the whole, this country is facing very big prob... NAGUIB MAHFOUZ The team owner, Frank Rogers, is in shock, very surprised and stunned, as are all of us. He was ther... JAMES MALONE I don't know if I have a favorite color. KATE MIDDLETON It's very special having a new little girl. KATE MIDDLETON Choose your words before talking SOTONYE ANGA The books written by Paul Valéry, Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marshall McLuhan, Gilles De... NORBERT BOLZ For me, compatibility is a sense of humour, being able to laugh together; that is very important. FELICITY KENDAL (All the grief she had suffered over her lifetime had moulded her face into a mask of eternal sadnes... JEAN SASSON Most of us love a non-self, or something extrinsic and apart from our inner life; but a mother's lov... FULTON J. SHEEN I just had this notion that I wanted to do the most extreme thing I could and I also very consciousl... ARTO LINDSAY In order to remember who you are, you have to have known it in the first place. GREGORY MAGUIRE We are somewhat dismayed and in a sense disappointed of what we deem to be a very clear and blatant ... BILL WRIGHT I think that's always very valuable: to keep the mind open to receiving all sorts of information... P. J. HARVEY Michael is very, very, very saddened to learn of the passing of Bill Bray, who was a longtime friend... RAYMONE BAIN It shows that at PBL, there's no change with the passing of Kerry. They're all very good at what the... CHRIS HALL On offense, it's important for us to have good cuts and a lot of movement off the ball. Once we catc... KEELAN AMELIANOVICH There was a house at the foot of the tower, close to the thunder of the waves breaking against the c... GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ Each man lives in his own universe and when he dies the world is over BANGAMBIKI HABYARIMANA My dis-interest in what people speak of as "women's problems," "women's literature." Have women a sp... JOYCE CAROL OATES Pastor Smith did not have the religious constitution needed to provide salvation for any of us who�... CHERYL R COWTAN Yes, I mean, There's nothing like it. There is an added sense of pressure because of that, but t... MICHAEL C. HALL Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote. THOMAS MANN very remote risk. HEIDI MURKOFF If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would b... ERIC LIU Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern socie... JARED DIAMOND I'm always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It i... FLANNERY O'CONNOR Hard to restrain, unstable is this mind; it flits wherever it lists. Good it is to control the mind.... GAUTAMA BUDDHA It is very important that women of this country be made aware of the dangers of osteoporosis in the ... RITA MORENO It's a remote island with very little access, so it has been little studied over the years. HARALDUR SIGURDSSON So a passing team definitely gives us more problems. It's going to be very difficult because they ha... BOBBY WALLACE The Beslan Mothers are becoming more and more empowered with time passing, ... The meeting is a very... LISA ARONSON I loved Barbara and am deeply saddened by her passing. Barbara Bel Geddes will be missed by many, bu... VICTORIA PRINCIPAL I think (Mamet) seduces people in the first act into thinking that it's a comedy, in a sense, ... Bu... CHRIS NOTH Texting is a supremely secretive medium of communication - it's like passing a note - and this m... LYNNE TRUSS There are a lot of editorials that have nothing to do with anything like that. But I was just thinki... ROBERT CREELEY There resides in the definition of "humanity" the need to be something more than flesh and blood. W. R. FUCHS One sees that dead, vacant look steal over the rarest, finest of women's faces . . . in the very mid... REBECCA HARDING DAVIS I accept the fact that there is always a way out in every situation we find ourselves but, until we ... ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH The issue isn't whether he loved you, it's how much. Too much. Love can be poison SARAH J. MAAS I am broken and healing, but every piece of my heart belong to you. SARAH J. MAAS He thinks he'll be remembered as the villain in the story. But I forgot to tell him that the villain... SARAH J. MAAS Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold ... GEORGE R.R. MARTIN Hodor," said Hodor. GEORGE R.R. MARTIN You do what you love, what you need SARAH J. MAAS I turned. Rhysand leaned against the archway into the sitting room, arms crossed, wings nowhere... SARAH J. MAAS
More Virginia Woolf
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. VIRGINIA WOOLF Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in c... VIRGINIA WOOLF One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as w... VIRGINIA WOOLF Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends c... VIRGINIA WOOLF I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It exp... VIRGINIA WOOLF Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and t... VIRGINIA WOOLF Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art. VIRGINIA WOOLF Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded. VIRGINIA WOOLF It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. VIRGINIA WOOLF Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is writ... VIRGINIA WOOLF As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. VIRGINIA WOOLF It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or... VIRGINIA WOOLF The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but ... VIRGINIA WOOLF So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by l... VIRGINIA WOOLF For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It h... VIRGINIA WOOLF Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all ... VIRGINIA WOOLF All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point VIRGINIA WOOLF Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of ro... VIRGINIA WOOLF Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written ... VIRGINIA WOOLF I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I... VIRGINIA WOOLF We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. VIRGINIA WOOLF Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! VIRGINIA WOOLF It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entir... VIRGINIA WOOLF The older one grows, the more one likes indecency. VIRGINIA WOOLF Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever t... VIRGINIA WOOLF At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials. VIRGINIA WOOLF These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect t... VIRGINIA WOOLF It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. VIRGINIA WOOLF If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not abo... VIRGINIA WOOLF Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others. VIRGINIA WOOLF My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring... VIRGINIA WOOLF We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by fi... VIRGINIA WOOLF I feel certain that I'm going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times.... VIRGINIA WOOLF As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. VIRGINIA WOOLF What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once. VIRGINIA WOOLF It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and... VIRGINIA WOOLF My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery --always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring... VIRGINIA WOOLF It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if... VIRGINIA WOOLF If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure -- the relationship so secret and private compa... VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of... VIRGINIA WOOLF Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women? VIRGINIA WOOLF All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority an... VIRGINIA WOOLF Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to t... VIRGINIA WOOLF But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in,... VIRGINIA WOOLF It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handlin... VIRGINIA WOOLF Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art. VIRGINIA WOOLF Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distort... VIRGINIA WOOLF Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned... VIRGINIA WOOLF The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the poli... VIRGINIA WOOLF That great Cathedral space which was childhood. VIRGINIA WOOLF The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping. VIRGINIA WOOLF Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of an... VIRGINIA WOOLF Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or VIRGINIA WOOLF When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred. VIRGINIA WOOLF We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even t... VIRGINIA WOOLF Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human... VIRGINIA WOOLF The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to fol... VIRGINIA WOOLF If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about e... VIRGINIA WOOLF A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in t... VIRGINIA WOOLF One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than whe... VIRGINIA WOOLF The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind. VIRGINIA WOOLF Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic. VIRGINIA WOOLF It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with... VIRGINIA WOOLF To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves. VIRGINIA WOOLF Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doin... VIRGINIA WOOLF No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. VIRGINIA WOOLF As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking. VIRGINIA WOOLF When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing. VIRGINIA WOOLF If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. VIRGINIA WOOLF I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It exp... VIRGINIA WOOLF Books are the mirrors of the soul. VIRGINIA WOOLF I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, re... VIRGINIA WOOLF To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father. VIRGINIA WOOLF Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the... VIRGINIA WOOLF Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever ... VIRGINIA WOOLF Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the... VIRGINIA WOOLF Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. VIRGINIA WOOLF The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. VIRGINIA WOOLF Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills ... VIRGINIA WOOLF Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you. VIRGINIA WOOLF One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of... VIRGINIA WOOLF A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her c... VIRGINIA WOOLF The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as s... VIRGINIA WOOLF But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority th... VIRGINIA WOOLF The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only... VIRGINIA WOOLF Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. VIRGINIA WOOLF There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intell... VIRGINIA WOOLF I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and w... VIRGINIA WOOLF I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure. VIRGINIA WOOLF Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before... VIRGINIA WOOLF Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our c... VIRGINIA WOOLF Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. VIRGINIA WOOLF Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be subst... VIRGINIA WOOLF Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... ... VIRGINIA WOOLF When a subject is highly controversial... one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how o... VIRGINIA WOOLF I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locke... VIRGINIA WOOLF Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every ye... VIRGINIA WOOLF Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and s... VIRGINIA WOOLF As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk... VIRGINIA WOOLF Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of cre... VIRGINIA WOOLF Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can on... VIRGINIA WOOLF For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in com... VIRGINIA WOOLF Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped... VIRGINIA WOOLF Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. VIRGINIA WOOLF A strange thing has happened -- while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has be... VIRGINIA WOOLF There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them ... VIRGINIA WOOLF Humor is the first gift to perish in a foreign language. VIRGINIA WOOLF Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still posse... VIRGINIA WOOLF For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private f... VIRGINIA WOOLF What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accid... VIRGINIA WOOLF Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of E... VIRGINIA WOOLF If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, w... VIRGINIA WOOLF What is meant by reality? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be... VIRGINIA WOOLF One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats --and one always secret... VIRGINIA WOOLF Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. VIRGINIA WOOLF Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even slee... VIRGINIA WOOLF The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only... VIRGINIA WOOLF In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us. VIRGINIA WOOLF Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning. VIRGINIA WOOLF The first duty of a lecturer--to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap u... VIRGINIA WOOLF It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality VIRGINIA WOOLF The first duty of a lecturer is to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap... VIRGINIA WOOLF Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women? VIRGINIA WOOLF The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story o... VIRGINIA WOOLF All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority an... VIRGINIA WOOLF A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. VIRGINIA WOOLF Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation. VIRGINIA WOOLF It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeate... VIRGINIA WOOLF This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to... VIRGINIA WOOLF On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points. VIRGINIA WOOLF When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazing... VIRGINIA WOOLF Language is wine upon the lips. VIRGINIA WOOLF Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry. VIRGINIA WOOLF A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it mu... VIRGINIA WOOLF Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the fi... VIRGINIA WOOLF Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figu... VIRGINIA WOOLF It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by c... VIRGINIA WOOLF One must love everything. VIRGINIA WOOLF How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this... VIRGINIA WOOLF The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish,... VIRGINIA WOOLF You cannot find peace by avoiding life. VIRGINIA WOOLF Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at... VIRGINIA WOOLF These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one... VIRGINIA WOOLF Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparen... VIRGINIA WOOLF Arrange whatever pieces come your way. VIRGINIA WOOLF Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bag... VIRGINIA WOOLF It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly. VIRGINIA WOOLF One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than... VIRGINIA WOOLF He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life. VIRGINIA WOOLF When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman se... VIRGINIA WOOLF It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hea... VIRGINIA WOOLF Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their ... VIRGINIA WOOLF To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want a... VIRGINIA WOOLF For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury y... VIRGINIA WOOLF For most of history, Anonymous was a woman. VIRGINIA WOOLF The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like ... VIRGINIA WOOLF I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. VIRGINIA WOOLF Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often ... VIRGINIA WOOLF The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty obser... VIRGINIA WOOLF Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all g... VIRGINIA WOOLF I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am roo... VIRGINIA WOOLF It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people ... VIRGINIA WOOLF It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning. VIRGINIA WOOLF One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her p... VIRGINIA WOOLF I rise from my worst disasters, I turn, I change. VIRGINIA WOOLF As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole worl... VIRGINIA WOOLF How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the sol... VIRGINIA WOOLF Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life. VIRGINIA WOOLF What does the brain matter compared with the heart? VIRGINIA WOOLF Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read. VIRGINIA WOOLF Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. VIRGINIA WOOLF If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure -- the relationship so secret and private com... VIRGINIA WOOLF I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street. VIRGINIA WOOLF I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of... VIRGINIA WOOLF The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness. VIRGINIA WOOLF If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly an... VIRGINIA WOOLF Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart. VIRGINIA WOOLF I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality o... VIRGINIA WOOLF The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. VIRGINIA WOOLF I am rooted, but I flow. VIRGINIA WOOLF When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they? VIRGINIA WOOLF Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. VIRGINIA WOOLF The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge... VIRGINIA WOOLF One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always se... VIRGINIA WOOLF I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it. VIRGINIA WOOLF The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is ... VIRGINIA WOOLF If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy... VIRGINIA WOOLF With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets—what nonsense was he ... VIRGINIA WOOLF Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck betwee... VIRGINIA WOOLF Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing. VIRGINIA WOOLF One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtl... VIRGINIA WOOLF What I value is the naked contact of a mind. VIRGINIA WOOLF Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic ac... VIRGINIA WOOLF All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense ... VIRGINIA WOOLF To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last,... VIRGINIA WOOLF