Virginia Woolf Quotes

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

She felt... 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 with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Margaret Ll. Davies writes that Janet is dying and will I write on her for The Times – a curious thought, rather: as if it mattered who wrote, or not. But this flooded me with the idea of Janet yesterday. I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.

Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.

She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!

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.

Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins — of happiness and unhappiness.

I think sometimes I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn.

Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then — our friends are not able to finish their stories.

The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.

He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.

A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.

Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent.

And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.