Virginia Woolf
If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people readingfor the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.Collection: Book
Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.Collection: Dream
Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.Collection: Running
King old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always to to a good man, they say.Collection: Kings
The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whitenessCollection: Sleep
The world is crammed with delightful thingsCollection: World
. . . to walk alone in London is the greatest rest.Collection: London
Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.Collection: Happiness
It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man.Collection: Art
what she loved: life, London, this moment of june.Collection: June
O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!Collection: Flower
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.Collection: Fall
to teach without zest is a crime.Collection: Zest
Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.Collection: Wall
I like the copious, shapeless, warm, not so very clever, but extremely easy and rather coarse aspect of things; the talk of men in clubs and public-houses; of miners half naked in drawers the forthright, perfectly unassuming, and without end in view except dinner, love, money and getting along tolerably; that which is without great hopes, ideals, or anything of that kind; what is unassuming except to make a tolerably, good job of it. I like all that.Collection: Jobs
For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.Collection: Musician
For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone. "What is it to be in love?" she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea. Hypnotized by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew away, she rose, and within, her two books beneath her arm returned again, much as a soldier prepares for battle.Collection: Book
I see through most people; I'm hardly ever wrong. I see at once what they've got in them.Collection: People
It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred.Collection: Hatred
Finally, I would thank, had I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America, who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the entomology, the geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine and will, I hope, not spare his services on the present occasion.Collection: Names
I grow numb; I grow stiff. How shall I break up this numbness which discredits my sympathetic heart?Collection: Heart
I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.Collection: Romantic
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.Collection: Soul
I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.Collection: Book
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned – in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?Collection: Book
As a woman, I have no country.Collection: Country
Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I’ve read and what I haven’t read.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Book
Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading – I like reading books in the bulk.Collection: Book
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don’t budge though armies cross them.Collection: Book