{"id":406,"date":"2017-03-01T15:37:37","date_gmt":"2017-03-01T15:37:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.english-culture.com\/?p=406"},"modified":"2018-05-03T16:02:24","modified_gmt":"2018-05-03T16:02:24","slug":"virginia-woolf-quotations-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.english-culture.com\/virginia-woolf-quotations-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Virginia Woolf Quotations (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Virginia<\/a>
Virginia Woolf quotes, aphorisms and ideas.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\"\"<\/a>Every phrase and gesture was studied. Now and again when she said something a little out of the ordinary she wrote it down herself in a notebook. It was like watching someone organizing her own immortality. Harold Laski (1893-1950) – On sitting next to Virginia Woolf at lunch. In a letter of George Lyttelton, 27 October 1955<\/span><\/p>\n

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t<\/span>
\n have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Language is wine upon the lips.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the<\/span>
\n soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural<\/span>
\n size.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from<\/span>
\n the beginning of consciousness to the end.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of<\/span>
\n truth.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud.<\/span>
\n And why? What’s this passion for?<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have<\/span>
\n minded beyond reason the opinions of others.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is<\/span>
\n always saying the very opposite to what other people say.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why<\/span>
\n not write about it truthfully?<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped<\/span>
\n through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its<\/span>
\n own.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have<\/span>
\n room to breathe.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.<\/span>
\n Virginia Woolf<\/span><\/p>\n

Virginia Woolf Quotations (Part 2)<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Quotes by authors<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Quotes by arguments<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every phrase and gesture was studied. Now and again when she said something a little out of the ordinary she wrote it down herself in a notebook. It was like watching someone …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":149608,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[161,202,261,180,182,187,209,143,146,11,190,192,16,193,217,171,90],"tags":[583,584,585,586,587,588,589,590,591,592,593,594,595],"class_list":["post-406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aphorisms","category-creativity","category-fantasy","category-friendship","category-happiness","category-ideas","category-imagination","category-language","category-life","category-literature","category-love","category-people","category-philosophy","category-poetry","category-psychology","category-quotes","category-spirituality","tag-bloomsbury-group","tag-bloomsbury-in-london","tag-duncan-grant","tag-e-m-forster","tag-g-e-moore","tag-john-maynard-keynes","tag-leonard-woolf","tag-lytton-strachey","tag-roger-fry","tag-stream-of-consciousness","tag-vanessa-bell","tag-virginia-wollf-quotes","tag-virginia-woolf"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t