Quotes by Virginia Woolf

“My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.”

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

“Just in case you ever foolishly forget; Im never not thinking of you.”

“To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poets, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeares has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world. ”

“Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

“Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”

“When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.”

“And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young mans, like Percivals, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!”

“To love makes one solitary.”

“the battered woman--for she wore a skirt--with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love--love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; deaths enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over.”