Quotes By Author: Virginia Woolf

“The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.”

“Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.”

“As for my next book, I won’t write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.”

“the battered woman–for she wore a skirt–with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love–love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death’s enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over.”

“No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes”

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

“Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure”

“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”

“The beauty of the world…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

“By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream”

“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…”

“Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier ’til this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”

“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?”