Quotes by Virginia Woolf

Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs! The exclamation, to me so surprising - for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex? - was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Life for both sexes - and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement - is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority - it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney - for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination - over other people.

The questions that we have to ask and to answer about that procession during this moment of transition are so important that they may well change the lives of men and women forever. For we have to ask ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that procession, or dont we? On what terms shall we join that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men?...Let us never cease from thinking--what is this civilisation in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men?

I should never be able to fulfill what is,I understand, the first duty of a lecturer-to hand you after an hours discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever.

Here she tossed her foot impatiently, and showed an inch or two of calf. A sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin of his teeth. If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow who, no doubt, has a wife and family to support, I must, in all humanity, keep them covered, Orlando thought. Yet her legs were among her chieftest beauties. And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when all a womans beauty has to be kept covered lest a sailor fall from a mast-head. A pox on them! she said, realizing for the first time what, in other circumstances, she would have been taught as a child, that is to say, the sacred responsibilities of womanhood...

Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified.

Lily was listening; Mrs. Ramsay was listening; they were all listening. But already bored, Lily felt that something was lacking; Mr. Bankes felt that something was lacking. Pulling her shawl round her Mrs. Ramsay felt that something was lacking. All of them bending themselves to listen thought, Pray heaven that the inside of my mind may not be exposed, for each thought, The others are feeling this. They are outraged and indignant with the government about the fishermen. Whereas, I feel nothing at all.

A woman, she had provoked this horror; a woman, she shouldh ave known how to deal with it. It was immesley to her discredit, sexually, to stand there dumb. One said - what did one say? - Oh, Mr. Ramsay! Dear Mr. Ramsay! That was what that kind old lady who sketched, Mrs. Beckwith, would have said instantly, and rightly. But, no. They stood there, isolated from the rest of the world. His immesnse self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and and spread itself in pools at her feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.

How then did it work out, this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?

If you drink the good wine of the noble countess, you have to entertain her less desirable friends.

For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not – Heaven help us – all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit?

Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life?

This fiddling and drifting and not impressing oneself upon anything – this always refraining and fingering and cutting things up into little jokes and facetiousness – thats whats so annihilating. Yet given little money, little looks, no special gift – what can one do? How could one battle? How could one leap on the back of life and wring its scruff?

The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the wind, flashed into Rachels mind, and she became profoundly excited at the thought of living.

The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order

I’ll be blasted’, he said, ‘if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I’ll write, from this day forward, to please myself

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.

Well, we must wait for the future to show.

The fact about contemporaries is that theyre doing the same thing on another railway line: one resents their distracting one, flashing past, the wrong way- something like that: from timidity, partly, one keeps ones eyes on ones own road.