Virginia Wolf > Quotes

“I am rooted, but I flow.”
― Virginia Wolf

“For a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”
― Virginia Wolf

“La marea comienza a descender. Los árboles afirman nuevamente sus raíces en la tierra. Las olas
de sangre que golpeaban mis costados se apaciguan y mi corazón echa anclas, semejante a un barco
cuyas velas se deslizan, cayendo suavemente sobre el puente inmaculado. El juego ha concluido. Es hora
de ir a tomar el té”
― Virginia Wolf, The Waves

“For what more terrifying revelation
can there be than that it is the present moment? That we
survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters
us on one side and the future on another.”
― Virginia Wolf, Orlando

“What if I told you I'm incapable of tolerating my own heart?”
― Virginia Wolf

“All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. ... And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. ... They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that ...”
― Virginia Wolf, A Room of One’s Own

“What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne—we may stop there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men, and of these three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well to do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well to do, and I challenge you that, if he had not been well to do, he would no more have attained to write Saul or The Ring and the Book than Ruskin would have attained to writing Modern Painters if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a mad-house, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is—however dishonouring to us as a nation—certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance. Believe me—and I have spent a great part of ten years in watching some three hundred and twenty elementary schools, we may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’ (cit. The Art of Writing, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch)
Nobody could put the point more plainly. ‘The poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance . . . a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’ That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own. However, thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past, of whom I wish we knew more, thanks, curiously enough to two wars, the Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room, and the European War which opened the doors to the average woman some sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be bettered. Otherwise you would not be here tonight, and your chance of earning five hundred pounds a year, precarious as I am afraid that it still is, would be minute in the extreme.”
― Virginia Wolf

“Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction--so we are told.”
― Virginia Wolf, A Room of One’s Own

“There was a bill that he would pay with a real two shilling piece, and it was real, all real, he assured himself, fingering the coin in his pocket, real to everyone except to him and to her; even to him it began to seem real; and then–but it was too exciting to stand and think any longer, and he pulled the parasol out of the earth with a jerk and was impatient to find the place where one had tea with other people, like other people.”
― Virginia Wolf

“«I need solitude. I need space. I need air. I need the empty fields round me; and my legs pounding along roads; and sleep; and animal existence».”
― Virginia Wolf

“when you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?”
― Virginia Wolf

“Orlando had become a woman—there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits above, practically the same. His memory—but in future we must, for conventions sake, say 'her' for 'his,' and 'she' for 'he'—her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle.”
― Virginia Wolf

“Se você não disser a verdade a seu respeito, não terá como dizê-la sobre outras pessoas."
Virginia Woolf - O Valor do Riso e Outros Ensaios”
― virginia wolf

“No hay necesidad de apresurarse. No hay necesidad de brillar. No hay necesidad de ser nadie más que uno mismo.”
― Virginia Wolf, A Room of One’s Own

“What if I told you I was incapable of tolerating my own heart.”
― Virginia Wolf