1,646 Quotes by Virginia Woolf

When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.

The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.

Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?

... I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.

He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a sparkle of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type.

She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

There is something I want-something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed.