Virginia Woolf Quotes

To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...

Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscription on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay's knee.

But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.

Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.

It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.

We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe
that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie
asleep.

some we know to be dead even though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through all the forms of life; other are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six

For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.

Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence

Directly the mulberry tree begins to make you circle, break off. Pelt the tree with laughter.

...she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having.