The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper...

— Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf Quotes

I make it a rule to try everything,” she said. “Don’t you think it would be very annoying if you tasted ginger for the first time on your deathbed, and found you never liked anything so much? I should be so exceedingly annoyed that I think I should get well on that account alone.

— Virginia Woolf

I have felt that odd whirr of wings in the head.

— Virginia Woolf

I feel like Rimbaud, that I walked out of my madness, and away from my demon. I admitted to needing to be by mysef at periods. I am happy, but lazy and uninspired.

— Virginia Woolf

Genius needs freedom; it cannot flower if it is encumbered by fear, or rancor, or dependency, and without money freedom is impossible.

— Virginia Woolf

You have no one who has any sort of consideration for you. You have had patience and endurance till I am sick of the virtues, and what have they done for you? Half-killed you.

— Virginia Woolf

How resilient I am; and how fatalistic now; and how little I mind and how much; and how good my novel is; and how tired I am this morning; and how I like praise; and how full of ideas I am; and Tom and Stephen came to tea, and Ray and William dine; and I forgot to describe my interesting talk with Nessa about my criticizing her children; and I left out – I forget what.

— Virginia Woolf

People are so soon gone; let us catch them.

— Virginia Woolf

Married against their will, kept in one room, and to one occupation, how could a dramatist give a full or interesting or truthful account of them? Love was the only possible interpreter. The poet was forced to be passionate or bitter, unless indeed he chose to ‘hate women’, which meant more often than not that he was unattractive to them.

— Virginia Woolf

She wore ear-rings, and a silver-green mermaid’s dress. Lolloping on the waves and braiding her tresses she seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed; turned, caught her scarf in some other woman’s dress, unhitched it, laughed, all with the most perfect ease and air of a creature floating in its element. But age had brushed her; even as a mermaid might behold in her glass the setting sun on some very clear evening over the waves.

— Virginia Woolf

The night and the stars, the dawn coming up, the barges swimming past, the sun setting... Ah dear,” she sighed, “well, the sunset is very lovely too. I sometimes think that poetry isn’t so much what we write as what we feel, Mr. Denham.

— Virginia Woolf

And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, 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 and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach. Mr.

— Virginia Woolf

She liked to be alone; she liked to be herself.

— Virginia Woolf

Orlando had become a woman. In every other aspect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been.

— Virginia Woolf

I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.

— Virginia Woolf

And were they happy together? Sally asked... ; for, she admitted, she knew nothing about them, only jumped to conclusions, as one does, for what can one know even of the people one lives with every day? she asked. Are we not all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life – one scratched on the wall.

— Virginia Woolf

I can’t tell you how piercingly and endlessly I think about you.

— Virginia Woolf

My position is quite simple. If the house is on fire one does not ask first who is to be blamed for the conflagration; one puts it out. My heart is afire.

— Virginia Woolf

The sky is blue,’ he said, ‘the grass is green.’ Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods.

— Virginia Woolf

Her hand cut a trail in the sea, as her mind made the green swirls and streaks into patterns and, numbed and shrouded, wandered in imagination in that underworld of waters were the pearls stuck in clusters to white sprays, where in the green light a change came over one’s entire mind and one’s body shine half transparent enveloped in a green cloak.

— Virginia Woolf

Chloe liked Olivia,’ I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature.

— Virginia Woolf
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