Quotes by Virginia Woolf

“For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there mustbe between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and shehim.”

“Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.”

“But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.”

“I begin to be impatient of solitude - to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me.”

“But we-' she glanced at him as if to ascertain his position, 'we see each other only now and then-''Like lights in a storm-''In the midst of a hurricane,' she concluded, as the window shook beneath...”

“Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.”

“Hail, happiness, then, and after happiness, hail not those dreams which bloat the sharp image as spotted mirrors do the face in a country-inn parlour; dreams which splinter the whole and tear us as...”

“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself...”

“alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know”

“He is precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the rest of his life.”

“It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”

“Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! ...”

“Here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?”

“I don't care much whether I ever get to know anything - but I want to work out something in figures - something that hasn't got to do with human beings. I don't want people particularly. In some wa...”

“When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.”

“She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world h...”

“It was awful, he cried, awful, awful!Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.”

“Why, after all, did she do these things? Why seek pinnacles and stand drenched in fire? Might it consume her anyhow! Burn her to cinders! Better anything, better brandish one's torch and hurl it to...”

“Why--?" he jerked his thumb in the direction of the young, "when they're so lovely--"She too looked at the girl, who was fastening a flower that had come undone in the front of her frock. She smile...”

“Odder still how possessed I am with the feeling that now, aged 50, I’m just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are. Therefore all this flitter flutter ...”