Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Knitting is the saving of life.

He's read nothing, thought nothing, felt nothing, he could hear her saying in that empathic voice which carried so much farther than she knew.

And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach. Mr

she] might have been a shell, and his words water rubbing against her ears, as water rubs a shell on the edge of a rock.

What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! (...) I think I could happily live here & read forever.

How terrible old age was, she thought; shearing off all one's faculties, one by one, but leaving something alive in the centre.

We have been taking into our mouths the bodies of dead birds.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown.

He went on saying No to her, on principle, for he never yielded to a woman on account of her sex.

She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not

this admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence, which ran up and down, crossed this way and that, ... upholding the world, so that she could trust herself to it utterly ... Then she woke up. It was still being fabricated.

It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for. Reality dwelling in what one saw and felt, but did not talk about, one could accept a system in which things went round and round quite satisfactorily to other people, without often troubling to think about it, except as something superficially strange.