1,646 Quotes by Virginia Woolf

As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.

Oh, to awake from dreaming!

But beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty - it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life - froze it. One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or shadow, which made the face unrecognisable for a moment and yet added quality one saw for ever after. It was simpler to smooth that all out under the cover of beauty.

How could any Lord have made this world?... there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for this world to commit... No happiness lasted.

Sie fühlte sich sehr jung; gleichzeitig unaussprechlich betagt. Sie schnitt wie ein Messer durch alles; war gleichzeitig außerhalb und sah zu. Sie hatte eine nicht endende Empfindung, während sie die Droschken beobachtete, draußen zu sein, draußen, weit draußen auf See, und allein; sie hatte immer das Gefühl, es sei sehr, sehr gefährlich, auch nur einen Tag zu leben.

There is a certain 'beauty' in illness - one is alone - one reads - one thinks - one sees only the people one like seeing. (27 (?)/5/1928) - From a Letter to Duncan Grant)

Gold runs in our blood.

Yet she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreathes heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile and inhumane than love; yet it is also absolutely beautiful and necessary.

Shakespeare is getting flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him, as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the reach of scribbling fingers. With all this buzz of criticism about, one may hazard one's conjectures privately, make one's notes in the margin; but, knowing that someone has said it before, or said it better, the zest is gone. Illness, it its kingly sublimity, sweeps all that aside and leaves nothing but Shakespeare and oneself.