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Virginia Woolf Quotes

Total quotes: 17
“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.”
— Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary
Tagged: Anxiety, what anxiety feels like, anxiety in literature, Mind, Examples of Similes
“I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
Tagged: Introvert
“Some people go to priests, others to poetry, I to my friends.”
— Virginia Woolf, Selected Works Of Virginia Woolf
Tagged: Friendship, Friends
“Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.”
— Virginia Woolf, Selected Letters
Tagged: Love, Literature, I Miss You, LDR
“It is true that the surface may have some connection with the depths, but if we are to help you to prevent war we must try to penetrate deeper beneath the skin.”
— Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
Tagged: Surface, Stop War
“I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Identity
“Tears rose slowly in her eyes and stood there, brimming but contained. The tears of some profound emotion, happiness, grief, renunciation; an emotion so complex in its nature that to express it was impossible.”
— Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
Tagged: Tears, Crying, The Meaning of Tears
“It seemed to her that there was something amateurish in bringing romantic love into touch with a perfectly straightforward friendship.”
— Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
Tagged: Marriage, Love, Friendship
“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Fluid Identity, Who Calls When I Say I?, Always Shifting
“Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Pain
“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Tagged: Life, Existential Crisis, Perspective
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Tagged: first lines of books
“Clear-cut and unequivocal am I too. Yet a vast inheritance of experience is packed in me. I have lived thousands of years. I am like a worm that has eaten its way through the wood of a very old oak beam. But now I am compact; now I am gathered together this fine morning.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Conservation
“Oh the torture of never being left alone! I find it impossible to disentangle myself from those instincts, affections, passions, attachments…which bound me…from the first moment of consciousness to other people. I need solitude; I need to feel I belong to myself.’”
— Virginia Woolf, Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897 - 1909
Tagged: An Introverted Mind
“The birds sang passionate songs addressed to one ear only and then stopped. Bubbling and chuckling they carried little bits of straw and twig to the dark knots in the higher branches of the trees. Gilt and purpled they perched in the garden, where cones of laburnum and purple shook down gold and lilac, for now at midday the garden was all blossom and profusion and even the tunnels under the plants were green and purple and tawny as the sun beat through the red petal, or the broad yellow petal, or was barred by some thickly furred green stalk.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Song of Birds, Nature Descriptions
“Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one’s friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one’s self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody— with whom?— with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I?”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Identity, Mixed
“Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and fall and rise again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet. Boats and youth passing and distant trees, ‘the falling fountains of the pendent trees.’ I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this, I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop— how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot give myself to their backs; I cannot fly with them.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Tagged: Ideals, Longing, Power of Words
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