Quotes from Virginia Woolf

I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart.

There is nothing staid, nothing settled, in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph.

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.

For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying--what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must simply say what one felt.

Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.

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.

For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.

Be truthful, one would say, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.

It was love, she thought, love that never clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of human gain. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem.

After that, how unbelievable death was! - that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.

For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another.

She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust.

Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.

When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.

We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.

I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement...

But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the teashop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him- he could not feel. He could reason; he could read, Dante for example, quite easily…he could add up his bill; his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then- that he could not feel.

There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death…

Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the center which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

If you are losing your leisure, look out! -- It may be you are losing your soul.

Marvelous are the innocent.

They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

Life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness, one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.