Quotes from Virginia Woolf

There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room.

I exist only in the soles of my feet and in the tired muscles of my thighs. We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot remember.

I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.

We are about to part, said Neville. Here are the boxes; here are the cabs. There is Percival in his billycock hat. He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unaswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. I shall propose a meeting - under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait and he will not come. It is for that that I love him.

But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave.

Well, I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married.

A good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.

The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.' That will be useful.

I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis waking that kills us.

Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.