Stefanie > Stefanie's Quotes

“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jaques--literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.”
― Virginia Woolf

“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“I am not one and simple, but complex and many.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“...who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

“Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?”
― Virginia Woolf

“I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy - to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next. ”
― Virginia Woolf , The Waves

“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

“Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art”
― Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Four: 1931-1935

“I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

“I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters

“Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.”
― Virginia Woolf

“How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?”
― Virginia Woolf

“I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you.”
― Virginia Woolf, Selected Diaries

“It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. ”
― Virginia Woolf

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own