Quotes from Virginia Woolf

In short, every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.

Uno no puede traer hijos a un mundo como éste. Uno no puede perpetuar el sufrimiento, ni aumentar la raza de esos lujuriosos animales, que no tienen emociones duraderas, sino tan solo caprichos y vanidades que ahora les llevan a un lado, y luego hacía otro.

I am growing up,' she thought, taking her taper. 'I am losing my illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones

listen not to the bark of the guns and the bray of the gramophones but to the voices of the poets, answering each other, assuring us of a unity that rubs out divisions as if they were chalk marks only; to discuss with you the capacity of the human spirit to overflow boundaries and make unity out of multiplicity.

Mrs. Hilbery would have been perfectly well able to sustain herself if the world had been what the world is not. She was beautifully adapted for life in another planet.

there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one's parents giving it into one's hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear.

Her hand cut a trail in the sea, as her mind made the green swirls and streaks into patterns and, numbed and shrouded, wandered in imagination in that underworld of waters where the pearls stuck in clusters to white sprays, where in the green light a change came over one's entire mind and one's body shone half transparent enveloped in a green cloak.

It was not Orlando who spoke, but the spirit of the age. But whichever it was, nobody answered it.

Åžimdi ac?m? mendilime saraca??m. S?ms?k? düÄŸüm olacak.

In the Queen's prayerbook, along with the blood-stain, was also a lock of hair and a crumb of pastry; Orlando now added to these keepsakes a flake of tobacco, and so, reading and smoking, was moved by the humane jumble of them all--the hair, the pastry, the blood-stain, the tobacco--to such a mood of contemplation as gave her a reverent air suitable in the circumstances, though she had, it is said, no traffic with the usual God.

Let us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible handwriting….here we have copied out fine passages from the classics;…here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink.

I make it a rule to try everything, she said. Don't you think it would be very annoying if you tasted ginger for the first time on your deathbed, and found you never liked anything so much? I should be so exceedingly annoyed that I think I should get well on that account alone.

Things were not so simple after all. She could not understand even her own feelings. She saw the most cherished of her convictions put into practice - and her eyes filled with tears. She had won fame and independence and the right to live her own life - and she wanted something different.

now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year. It increased, he said, alas, perhaps, but one should be glad of it-- it went on increasing in his experience.

We saw for a moment laid out among us the body of the complete human being whom we have failed to be, but at the same time, cannot forget.

There is no denying the wild horse in us.

it seemed absurd, I thought, turning over the evening paper, that a man with all this power should be angry. Or is anger, I wondered, somehow, the familiar, the attendant sprite on power? Rich people, for example, are often angry because they suspect that the poor want to seize their wealth.

But for a moment I had sat on the turf somewhere high above the flow of the sea and the sound of the woods, had seen the house, the garden, and the waves breaking. The old nurse who turns the pages of the picture book had stopped and had said, 'Look. This is the truth.

Damn it, Madam, you are loveliness incarnate," which was the truth.

I would never re-write you. You are by far my most complete and greatest novel.

shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.

The words of authority are corrupted by those who speak them.

Unhappiness is everywhere; just beyond the door; or stupidity, which is worse

How little, after all, one can tell anybody about one's life! Here I sit; there you sit; both, I doubt not, chock-full of the most interesting experiences, ideas, emotions; yet how communicate?