Quotes from Virginia Woolf

He was amused and gratified to find that he had the power to annoy his oblivious, supercilious hostess, if he could not impress her; though he would have preferred to impress her. He

Thus, when one takes a sentence of Mr B into the mind it falls plump to the ground— dead; but when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.

She was climbing up those branches, this way and that, laying hands on one flower and then another. Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose, she read, and so reading she was ascending, she felt, on to the top, on to the summit. How satisfying! How restful! All the odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet; her mind felt swept, felt clean. And then there it was, suddenly entire; she held it in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, here—the sonnet.

The age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours; nor their poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even. Everything was different. The weather itself, the heat and cold of summer and winter, was, we may believe, of another temper altogether.

She stood there: she listened. She heard the names of the stars.

It is only that I want to be with you and not with anybody else - but you would get bored if I go on saying this, only it comes back and back till it drips of my pen.

Down there among the roots where the flowers decayed, gusts of dead smells were wafted; drops formed on the bloated sides of swollen things. The skin of rotten fruit broke, and matter oozed too thick to run.

Far away a bell tolls, but not for death. There are bells that ring for life. A leaf falls, from joy. Oh, I am in love with life!

She felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring, roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

I have lived a thousand lives already. Every day I unbury--I dig up. I find relics of myself in the sand that women made thousands of years ago...

And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed, one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.