Quotes from Virginia Woolf

For centuries the writing-desk has contained sheets fit precisely for the communication of friends. Masters of language, poets of long ages, have turned from the sheet that endures to the sheet that perishes, pushing aside the tea-tray, drawing close to the fire (for letters are written when the dark presses around a bright red cave), and addressed themselves the task of reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart.

I addressed my self as one would speak to a companion with whom one is voyaging to the North Pole.

One rose leaf, falling from an enormous height, like a little parachute dropped from an invisible balloon, turns, flutters waveringly.

The summer is put away folded up in the drawer with other summers.

So that was the end of that marriage.

Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions — "Will you fade? Will you perish?" — scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain.

As for the beauty of women, it is like the light on the sea, never constant to a single wave. They all have it; they all lose it.

We have destroyed something by our presence, a world perhaps.

To speak or to be silent was equally an effort, for when they were silent they were keenly conscious of each other's presence, and yet words were either too trivial or too large.

Never had any boy begged apples as Orlando begged paper; nor sweetmeats as he begged ink. Stealing away from talk and games, he had hidden himself behind curtains, in priest's holes, or in the cupboard behind his mother's bedroom which had a great hole in the floor and smelt horribly of starling's dung, with an inkhorn in one hand, a pen in another, and on his knee a roll of paper.

To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy.

I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.