One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.
— The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Six, 1936-1941
Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!
— Mrs. Dalloway
I should need to be a herd of elephants, I thought, and a wilderness of spiders, desperately referring to the animals that are reputed longest lived and most multitudinously eyed, to cope with all of this.
— A Room of One's Own
This idea struck me: the army is the body: I am the brain. Thinking is my fighting. (15 May 1940)
— The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Five: 1936-1941
This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing.
— Mrs. Dalloway
As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.
— Orlando
I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.
— The Question of Things Happening: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 2: 1912-1922
In the flailing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances
— To the Lighthouse
I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.
— The Waves
The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful.
— The Waves
I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
— The Waves
...to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.
— A Writer's Diary
— To the Lighthouse
Well, we must wait for the future to show.
— To the Lighthouse
The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks—so it sounded.
— Jacob's Room
. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.
— Orlando
And the supreme mystery was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?
— Mrs. Dalloway
— The Waves
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.
— To the Lighthouse
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.
— Mrs. Dalloway
Mrs. Dalloway raised her hand to her eyes, and, as the maid shut the door to, and she heard the swish of Lucy's skirts, she felt like a nun who has left the world and feels fold round her the familiar veils and the response to old devotions.
— Mrs. Dalloway
The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.
— A Writer's Diary