Quotes from Virginia Woolf

The night and the stars, the dawn coming up, the barges swimming past, the sun setting.... Ah dear, she sighed, well, the sunset is very lovely too. I sometimes think that poetry isn't so much what we write as what we feel, Mr. Denham.

I am she that men call Modesty. Virgin I am and ever shall be. Not for me the fruitful fields and the fertile vineyard. Increase is odious to me; and when the apples burgeon or the flocks breed, I run, I run, I let my mantle fall. My hair covers my eyes, I do not see. Spare, O spare!

There it was, all round them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity.

She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup. as if there was an eddy--there--and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it.

We have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal in the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print.

In all the books love is one of the great facts that mould human life. But it is a catastrophe: it happens suddenly and overwhelmingly, and there is little to be said about it.

At this moment, I feel as if the human race had no character at all — sought for nothing, believed in nothing, & fought only from a dreary sense of duty.

Though the wind is rough and blowing in their faces, those girls there, striding hand in hand, shouting out a song, seem to feel neither cold nor shame. They are hatless. They triumph.

I've seen more trouble come from long engagements than from any other forms of human folly.

But suppose Peter said to her, Yes, yes, but your parties—what's the sense of your parties? all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They're an offering; which sounded horribly vague. But

Her mind was like her room, in which lights advanced and retreated, came pirouetting and stepping delicately, spread their tails, pecked their way; and then her whole being was suffused, like the room again, with a cloud of some profound knowledge, some unspoken regret, and then she was full of locked drawers, stuffed with letters, like her cabinets.

Queer, I mused, to see what we were thinking five years ago.