Virginia Woolf Quotes

#1. Beneath my eyes opens
a book; I see to the bottom; the heart
I see to the depths. I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#2. Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations ... #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#3. He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#4. I will go down with my colors flying. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#5. They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#6. I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. There I sat. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#7. I look over at my hero shelf and see Philip Levine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Shunryu Suzuki, Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, Subcomandante Marcos, Eduardo Galeano, James Baldwin. These books are, if they are instructions at all, instructions in extending our identities out into the world, human and nonhuman, in imagination as a great act of empathy that lifts you out of yourself, not locks you down into your gender.
("80 Books No Woman Should Read") #Quote by Rebecca Solnit

#8. So she sat down to morning tea, like any other old lady with a high nose, thin cheeks, a ring on her finger and the usual trappings of rather shabby but gallant old age... #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#9. To be them would be marvelous, but she was condemned to be herself and could only in this silent enthusiastic way, sitting outside in a garden, applaud the society of humanity from which she was excluded. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#10. In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#11. If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills - than my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#12. If people are highly successful in their profession they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#13. The public and the private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#14. The whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#15. With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets - what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least: she had eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen: with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair - He took her bag. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#16. Well then, we went and had tea with Henry James today…and Henry James fixed me with his staring blank eye - it is like a childs marble - and said 'My dear Virginia, they tell me - they tell me - they tell me - that you - as indeed being your fathers daughter nay your grandfathers grandchild - the descendant I may say of a century - of a century - of quill pens and ink - ink - ink pots, yes, yes, yes, they tell me - ahm m m - that you, that you, that you write in short.' This went on in the public street, while we all waited, as farmers wait for the hen to lay an egg - do they? - nervous, polite, and now on this foot now on that. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#17. What did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#18. Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language. "English," writes Virginia Woolf, "which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache." ... Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it. #Quote by Elaine Scarry

#19. I fear I shall be a clinger to the outsides of words all my life. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#20. So, when there is a strife of tongues, at some meeting, the chairman, to obtain unity, suggests that every one shall speak in French. Perhaps it is bad French; French may not contain the words that express the speaker's thoughts; nevertheless speaking French imposes some order, some uniformity. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#21. There is little blood in my arm, Isabella repeated. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#22. But Orlando was a woman - Lord Palmerston had just proved it. And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman's whole existence. And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing at her table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for that calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window - all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible subject for fiction. Surely Orlando must have done one of these things? Alas, - a thousand times, alas, Orlando did none of them. Must it then be admitted that Orlando was one of those monsters of iniquity who do not love? She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love - as the male novelists define it - and who, after all, speak with greater authority? - has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one' #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#23. For it is a curious fact that though human beings have such imperfect means of communication, that they can only say 'good to eat' when they mean 'beautiful' and the other way about, they will yet endure ridicule and misunderstanding rather than keep any experience to themselves. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#24. Marriage, in short, is a bargain, like buying a house or entering a profession. One chooses it knowing that, by that very decision, one is abnegating other possibilities. In choosing companionship over passion, women like Beatrice Webb and Virginia Woolf made a bargain; their marriages worked because they did not regret their bargains, or blame their husbands for not being something else--dashing lovers, for example. But in writing biographies, or one's own life, it is both customary and misleading to present such marriages, to oneself or to one's reader, as sad compromises, the best of a bad bargain, or scarcely to speak of them at all. Virginia Woolf mentioned that she, who is reticent about nothing, had never spoken of her life with Leonard. but we know that she said of him that when he entered a room, she had no idea what he was going to say, a remarkable definition of a good marriage. Such marriages are not bad bargains, but the best of a good bargain, and we must learn the language to understand and describe them, particularly in writing the lives of accomplished women. #Quote by Carolyn G. Heilbrun

#25. 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. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#26. No guinea of earned money should go to rebuilding the college on the old plan just as certainly none could be spent upon building a college upon a new plan: therefore the guinea should be earmarked "Rags. Petrol. Matches." And this note should be attached to it. "Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance round the fire and heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. And let their mothers lean from the upper windows and cry, "Let it blaze! Let it blaze! For we have done with this 'education! #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#27. Soup is cuisines kindest course #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#28. How many people have I heard claim their children as the greatest accomplishment and comfort of their lives? It's the thing they can always lean on during a metaphysical crisis, or a moment of doubt about their relevancy - If I have done nothing else in this life, then at least I have raised my children well.

But what if, either by choice or by reluctant necessity, you end up not participating in this comforting cycle of family and continuity? What if you step out? Where do you sit at the reunion? How do you mark time's passage without the fear that you've just fritted away your time on earth without being relevant? You'll need to find another purpose, another measure by which to judge whether or not you have been a successful human being. I love children, but what if I don't have any? What kind of person does that make me?

Virginia Woolf wrote, "Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword." On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where "all is correct." But on the other side of that sword, if you're crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, "all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course." Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will also be more perilous. #Quote by Elizabeth Gilbert

#29. She took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstacy in the air. Where to begin?
that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#30. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing… was struck into stability. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#31. I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#32. Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you
how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment.
But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#33. I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#34. And Oliver, rising, could hear the rustle of the dress of the Duchess as she came down the passage. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#35. But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#36. I walk making up phrases; sit, contriving scenes; am in short in the thick of the greatest rapture known to me. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#37. I like observing people. I like looking at things. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#38. Better is it', she thought, 'to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex; better be quit of martial ambition, the love of power, and all the other manly desires if so one can more fully enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the humane spirit, which are', she said aloud as her habit was when deeply moved, 'contemplation, solitude, love. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#39. The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with skepticism and solitude. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#40. So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signalling to me. Not indeed in actual words; that is, he could not read the language yet; but it was plain enough, this beauty, this exquisite beauty, and tears filled his eyes as he looked at the smoke words languishing and melting in the sky and bestowing upon him in their inexhaustible charity and laughing goodness one shape after another of unimaginable beauty and signalling their intention to provide him, for nothing, for ever, for looking merely, with beauty, more beauty! Tears ran down his cheeks. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#41. All artists need a room of their own #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#42. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact. Therefore #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#43. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying
what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must simply say what one felt. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#44. Other worshipful objects were content with worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but this form, were it only the shape of a white lampshade looming on a wicker table, roused one to perpetual combat, challenged one to a fight in which one was bound to be worsted. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#45. 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 poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#46. Without self awareness we are as babies in the cradles. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#47. As for himself, when he went to go to a party, as one was sometimes obliged to, from a wish not to give offence, he walked into the middle of the room, said 'Ha! Ha!' as loud as ever he could, considered he had done his duty, and went home. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#48. Deffand fell in love with him, and thought that at her age she could #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#49. To stand in a great bookshop crammed with books so new that their pages almost stick together, and the gilt on their backs is still fresh, has an excitement no less delightful than the old excitement of the second-hand bookstall. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#50. Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#51. Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#52. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#53. Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#54. Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#55. To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world? #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#56. He Lord who had come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow blanket smitten only by the sun, for ever unwasted, suffering for ever, the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer ... #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#57. I catch your eye. I, who had been thinking myself so vast, a temple, a church, a whole universe, confined and capable of being everywhere on the verge of things and here too, am now nothing but what you see. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#58. This fiddling and drifting and not impressing oneself upon anything – this always refraining and fingering and cutting things up into little jokes and facetiousness – that's what's 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? #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#59. One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in it. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#60. What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#61. Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#62. The people we are most fond of are not good for us when we are ill. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#63. I think sometimes I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#64. but what his family most resented, he reflected, was his wish for privacy. To dine alone, or to sit alone after dinner, was flat rebellion, to be fought with every weapon of underhand stealth or of open appeal. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#65. Somehow the fact that only three or four hundred years ago these skeletons had been men with their way to make in the world like any modern upstart, and that they had made it by acquiring houses and offices, garters and ribbands, as any other upstart does, while poets, perhaps, and men of great mind and breeding had preferred the quietude of the country, for which choice they paid the penalty by extreme poverty, and now hawked broadsheets in the Strand, or herded sheep in the fields, filled her with remorse. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#66. It was chivalrous because she was too remote for real companionship, so that there was always a kind of chance in one's offering; perhaps she would not perceive it; perhaps she would kindle rapture by a sudden recognition; her distance made such close moments exquisitely sweet. But alas, no humble friendship however romantic, could give her the sense that we completely shared her thoughts; the nature of them made it hard for anyone to understand; and her sorrow was very lonely. Perhaps one would come into a room unexpectedly and surprise her in tears, and, to one's miserable confusion, she would hide them instantly, and speak ordinary words, as though she did not imagine that one could understand her suffering. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#67. She had made him think he could do anything. Nobody else took him seriously. But she made him believe that he could do whatever he wanted. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#68. The moment was all; the moment was enough. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#69. There they are.
The extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white, again yellow, and in some lights red, imposes ideas of durability, of the emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewhere dissipated in elegant trifles. But durability exists independently of our admiration. Although the beauty is sufficiently humane to weaken us, to stir the deep deposit of mud - memories, abandonments, regrets, sentimental devotions - the Parthenon is separate from all that; and if you consider how it has stood out at night, for centuries, you begin to connect the blaze (at midnight the glare is dazzling and the frieze almost invisible) with the idea that perhaps it is beauty alone that is immortal. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#70. Sometimes he woke with a brain like lead; at others it was as if a thousand wax tapers were alight and people were throwing fireworks inside him. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#71. I will cut adrift - I will sit on pavements and drink coffee - I will dream; I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim - this fine October. #Quote by Virginia Woolf,

#72. But cricket was no mere game. Cricket was important. [S]he could never help reading about cricket. [S]he read the scores in the stop press first, then how it was a hot day; then about a murder case. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#73. Now, the truth is that when one has been in a state of mind (as nurses call it) - and the tears still stood in Orlando's eyes - the thing one is looking at becomes, not itself, but another thing, which is bigger and much more important and yet remains the same thing. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#74. The light touched something green in the window corner and made it a lump of emerald, a cave of pure green like stoneless fruit. It sharpened the edges of chairs and tables and stitched white table-cloths with fine gold wires. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#75. I am never stagnant; I rise from my worst disasters, I turn, I change. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#76. Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#77. The lights of the town and of the harbour and of the boats seemed like a phantom net floating there to mark something that had sunk. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#78. In order to get nearer to Heaven, he set off to climb to the top of Notre Dame on a Wednesday morning, but owing to the gargoyles catching his trousers & meeting a party of American Schoolmistresses in a state of comparative nudity, he was forced to hide behind a Devil, & there stopped for the present. God being beyond him.
N.B. his trousers were torn, not the American achoolmistresses. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#79. She looked before she drank. Looking was part of drinking. why waste sensation, she seemed to ask, why waste a single drop that can be pressed out of this ripe, this melting, this adorable world? Then she drank. And the air round her became threaded with sensation. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#80. She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#81. We are all swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shade. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#82. Murmuring London flowed up to her, and her hand, lying on the sofa back, curled upon some imaginary baton such as her grandfathers might have held, holding which she seemed, drowsy and heavy, to be commanding battalions marching to Canada, and those good fellows walking across London, that territory of theirs, that little bit of carpet, Mayfair. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#83. Fending for oneself alone on a desert island is really no laughing matter. It is no crying one either #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#84. The train slows and lengthens, as we approach London, the centre, and my heart draws out too, in fear, in exaltation. I am about to meet
what? What extraordinary adventure awaits me, among these mail vans, these porters, these swarms of people calling taxis? I feel insignificant, lost, but exultant. With a soft shock we stop. I will let the others get before me. I will sit still one moment before I emerge into that chaos, that tumult. I will not anticipate what is to come. The huge uproar is in my ears. It sounds and resounds under this glass roof like the surge of a sea. We are cast down on the platform with our handbags. We are whirled asunder. My sense of self almost perishes; my contempt. I become drawn in, tossed down, thrown sky-high. I step on to the platform, grasping tightly all that I possess
one bag. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#85. At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#86. And I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#87. I see through most people; I'm hardly ever wrong. I see at once what they've got in them. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#88. Like all her friends, I miss her greatly ... But ... I am sure there is no case for lamentation ... Virginia Woolf got through an immense amount of work, she gave acute pleasure in new ways, she pushed the light of the English language a little further against darkness. Those are facts. #Quote by E. M. Forster

#89. This I say is the present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are attached. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#90. Arrange whatever pieces come your way. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#91. His wife was crying, and he felt nothing; only each time she sobbed in this profound, this silent, this hopeless way, he descended another step into the pit. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#92. How was one to lasso her mind, and tether it to this minute, unimportant spot? #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#93. And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin
thread (since they lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one´s friends were attached to one´s body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which (as dozed there) became hazy with the sond of bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider´s thread is blotted with rain –drops, and, burdened, sags down. So she slept. And Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whithbread hesitated at the corner of Conduit Street at the very moment that Millicent Bruton, lying on the sofa, let the thread snap, snored. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#94. Beautiful,' [his wife] would murmur, nudging Septimus that he might see. But beauty was behind a pane of glass. Even taste had no relish to him. He put down his cup on the little marble table. He looked at people outside; happy they seemed, collecting in the middle of the street, shouting, laughing, squabbling over nothing. But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the tea-shop among the tables and the chattering waiters the appalling fear came over him
he could not feel. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#95. A novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#96. There was a serenity about him always that had the look of innocence, when, technically, the word was no longer applicable. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#97. As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#98. If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#99. For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#100. Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#101. And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a bark, a bleat; irregular, intermittent, yet somehow related; the hum of an insect, the tremor of cut grass, dissevered yet somehow belonging; the jar of a dor beetle, the squeak of a wheel, loud, low, but mysteriously related; which the ear strains to bring together and is always on the verge of harmonising but they are never quite heard, never fully harmonised, and at last, in the evening, one after another the sounds die out, and the harmony falters, and silence falls. With the sunset sharpness was lost, and like mist rising, quiet rose, quiet spread, the wind settled; loosely the world shook itself down to sleep, darkly here without a light to it, save what came green suffused through leaves, or pale on the white flowers by the window.
[Lily Briscoe had her bag carried up to the house late one evening in September. Mr. Carmichael came by the same train.] #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#102. She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#103. The green garden, moonlit pool, lemons, lovers, and fish are all dissolved in the opal sky, across which, as the horns are joined by trumpets and supported by clarions there rise white arches firmly planted on marble pillars ... #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#104. Often she had seemed to herself to be moving among those vanished figures of old books and pictures, an invisible ghost among the living, better acquainted with them than with her own friends. she very nearly lost consciousness that she was a separate being, with a future of her own. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#105. She felt him trying to piece together in a laborious and elementary fashion fragments of belief, unsoldered and separate, lacking the unity of phrases fashioned by the old believers. Together they groped in this difficult region, where the unfinished, the unfulfilled, the unwritten, the unreturned, came together in their ghostly way and wore the semblance of the complete and the satisfactory. The future emerged more splendid than ever from this construction of the present. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#106. Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side all is correct, definite, orderly; the paths are straight, the trees regular, the sun shaded; escorted by gentlemen, protected by policemen, wedded and buried by clergymen, she has only to walk demurely from cradle to grave and no one will touch a hair of her head. But on the other side all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course. The paths wind between bogs and precipices; the trees roar and rock and fall in ruin. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#107. But it is always a question whether I wish to avoid these glooms. These weeks give one a plunge into deep waters. One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#108. ... the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea ... . It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to a shape ... .
You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#109. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding, or the deck of a tumbling ship
it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#110. But the Daily Mail isn't to be trusted," Jacob said to himself, looking about for something else to read. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#111. Feminism we have to destroy #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#112. I love tremendous and sonorous words. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#113. How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#114. 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? #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#115. 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. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#116. My belief is that if we live another century or so - I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals - and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton's bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#117. With a stranger he felt a renewal of hope because they could not say that he had not done what he had promised, and yielding to his charm would give him a fresh start - #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#118. Even Orlando (who had no conceit of her person) knew it, for she smiled the involuntary smile which women smile when their own beauty, which seems not their own, forms like a drop falling or a fountain rising and confronts them all of a sudden in the glass. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#119. What amulet is there against this disaster? What face can I summon to lay cool upon this heat? #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#120. for they were gifted, her children, but all in quite different ways. And the result of it was, she sighed, taking in the whole room from floor to ceiling, as she held the stocking against James's leg, that things got shabbier and got shabbier summer after summer....The wallpaper was flapping. You couldn't tell any more that those were roses on it. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#121. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#122. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#123. How immense must be the force of life which turns a baby , who can just distinguish a great blot of blue and purple on a black background, into the child who thirteen years later can feel all that I felt on May 5th 1895 - now almost exactly to a day, forty-four years ago - when my mother died. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#124. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#125. The history of most women is hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#126. It doesn't have to be the truth, just your vision of it, written down. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#127. All extremes are dangerous. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#128. No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he had cut out - a refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress - children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#129. About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#130. He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#131. Peace was the third emotion. Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#132. Forgetfulness in people might wound, their ingratitude corrode, but this voice, pouring endlessly, year in year out, would take whatever it might be; this vow; this van; this life; this procession, would wrap them all about and carry them on, as in the rough stream of a glacier the ice holds a splinter of bone, a blue petal, some oak trees, and rolls them on. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#133. The present participle is the Devil himself, she thought, now that we are in the place for believing in Devils. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#134. And at last, in the evening, one after another the sounds die out, and the harmony falters, and silence falls. With the sunset sharpness was lost and, like mist rising, quiet rose, quiet spread, the wind settled; loosely the world shook itself down to sleep, darkly here without a light to it, save what came green suffused through leaves, or pale on the white flowers by the window. [Lily #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#135. Then there's Queen Victoria, like a large tea cosy, & Wellington, sleek as a mastiff with paw extended ... #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#136. I don't care much whether I ever get to know anything - but I want to work out something in figures - something that hasn't got to do with human beings. I don't want people particularly. In some ways, Henry, I'm a humbug - I mean, I'm not what you all take me for. I'm not domestic, or very practical or sensible, really.And if I could calculate things, and use a telescope, and have to work out figures, and know to a fraction where I was wrong, I should be perfectly happy, and I believe I should give William all he wants. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#137. In her eyes shone the sweetness of melancholy. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#138. People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#139. Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here's death, she thought. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#140. There was something solemn in it- but love and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#141. On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#142. In the Queen's prayerbook, along with the
blood-stain, was also a lock of hair and a crumb of pastry; Orlando now
added to these keepsakes a flake of tobacco, and so, reading and smoking,
was moved by the humane jumble of them all
the hair, the pastry, the
blood-stain, the tobacco
to such a mood of contemplation as gave her a
reverent air suitable in the circumstances, though she had, it is said,
no traffic with the usual God. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#143. For Love, to which we may now return, has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you cannot separate them. In this case, Orlando's love began her flight towards him with her white face turned, and her smooth and lovely body outwards. Nearer and nearer she came wafting before her airs of pure delight. All of a sudden (at the sight of the Archduchess presumably) she wheeled about, turned the other way round; showed herself black, hairy, brutish; and it was Lust the vulture, not Love, the Bird of Paradise that flopped, foully and disgustingly, upon his shoulders. Hence he ran; hence he fetched the footman. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#144. 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 lodgement at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to call, directly they are alone...Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another. But it is not altogether plain sailing either...these selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled up on a waiter's hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own...so that one will only come if it is raining....another if you can promise it a glass of wine - and so on... #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#145. Mr. Denham cursed himself very sharply for having exchanged the freedom of the street for this sophisticated drawing-room, #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#146. For in all she said, however open she seemed and voluptuous, there was something hidden; in all she did, however daring, there was something concealed. So the green flame seems hidden in the emerald, or the sun prisoned in a hill. The clearness was only outward; within was a wandering flame. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#147. I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#148. Come along,' she said. 'They're waiting.'
He had never felt so happy in the whole of his life! Without a word they made it up. They walked down to the lake. He had twenty minutes of perfect happiness. Her voice, her laugh, her dress (something floating, white, crimson), her spirit, her adventurousness; she made them all disembark and explore the island; she startled a hen; she laughed; she sang. And all the time, he knew perfectly well, Dalloway was falling in love with her; she was falling in love with Dalloway; but it didn't seem to matter. Nothing mattered. They sat on the ground and talked-he and Clarissa. They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort. And then in a second it was over. He said to himself as they were getting into the boat, 'She will marry that man,' dully, without any resentment; but it was an obvious thing. Dalloway would marry Clarissa. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#149. One rose leaf, falling from an enormous height, like a little parachute dropped from an invisible balloon, turns, flutters waveringly. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#150. Extremes of feeling are allied to madness; #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#151. She was feeling reckless; nothing that she did mattered. She walked to the window and twitched the curtain apart. There were the stars pricked in little holes in the blue-black sky. There was a row of chimney-pots against the sky. Then the stars. Inscrutable, eternal, indifferent - those were the words; the right words. But I don't feel it, she said, looking at the stars. So why pretend to? What they're really like, she thought, screwing up her eyes to look at them, is little bits of frosty steel. And the moon - there it was - is a polished dish-cover. But she felt nothing, even when she had reduced moon and stars to that. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#152. Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#153. Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#154. But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful ... #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#155. Whenever you see a board up with "Trespassers will be prosecuted," trespass at once. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#156. Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers' breath, of ropes of pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#157. We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#158. Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write. For if Pride and Prejudice matters, and Middlemarch and Villette and Wuthering Heights matter, then it matters far more than I can prove in an hour's discourse that women generally, and not merely the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers, took to writing. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#159. No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#160. Women alone stir my imagination ... #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#161. He would look over the edge of the sofa down into the sea. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#162. I've just stopped talking to you. It seems so strange. It's perfectly peaceful here
they're playing bowls
I'd just put flowers in your room. And there you sit with the bombs falling around you.
What can one say
except that I love you and I've got to live through this strange quiet evening thinking of you sitting there alone.
Dearest
let me have a line ...
You have given me such happiness ... #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#163. Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#164. With a brain working and a body working one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was conscious of being. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#165. The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, "How's that? How's that?" of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, "I am guarding you––I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow––this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#166. Death is woven in with the violets," said Louis. "Death and again death.") #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#167. For though I have no wish to be Queen of England - or only for a moment - I would willingly sit beside her; I would hear the Prime Minister's gossips; the countess whisper, and share her memories of halls and gardens; the massive fronts of the respectable conceal after all their secret code; or why so impermeable? And then, doffing one's own headpiece, how strange to assume for a moment someone's - anyone's - to be a man of valour who has ruled the Empire; to refer while Brangaena sings to the fragments of Sophocles, or see in a flash, as the shepherd pipes his tune, bridges and aqueducts. But no - we must choose. Never was there a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain; more certain disaster; for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile: Whittaker in his lodging-house; Lady Charles at the manor #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#168. Here, she felt, putting the spoon down, was the still space that lies about the heart of things, where one could move or rest ... #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#169. Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest. #Quote by Michael Cunningham

#170. Why must they grow up and lose it all? #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#171. All looked distant and peaceful and strange. The shore seemed refined, far away, unreal. Already the little distance they had sailed had put them far from it and given it the changed look, the composed look, of something receding in which one has no longer any part. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#172. But how are you going to get out, into the world of other people? That is your problem now, if I may hazard a guess - to find the right relationship, now that you know yourself, between the self that you know and the world outside. It is a difficult problem. No living poet has, I think, altogether solved it. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#173. I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#174. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#175. I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#176. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of darkness. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#177. For
there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one
can never see for oneself. It is one of the good offices that sex can
discharge for sex
to describe that spot the size of a shilling at the
back of the head. Think how much women have profited by the comments of
Juvenal; by the criticism of Strindberg. Think with what humanity and
brilliancy men, from the earliest ages, have pointed out to women that
dark place at the back of the head! And if Mary were very brave and very
honest, she would go behind the other sex and tell us what she found
there. A true picture of man as a whole can never be painted until a
woman has described that spot the size of a shilling. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#178. Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place? #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#179. But Lord! once one began mouthing words
aloud, how silly they sounded! #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#180. For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone.
"What is it to be in love?" she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea. Hypnotized by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew away, she rose, and within, her two books beneath her arm returned again, much as a soldier prepares for battle. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#181. There'll be oceans of talk and emotions without end. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#182. The truth!" we demanded.
"Oh, the truth," she stammered, "the truth has nothing to do with literature," and sitting down she refused to say another word.
It all seemed to us very inconclusive. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#183. Thinking was torment; why not give up thinking, and drift and dream? But the misery of the world, she thought, forces me to think. Or was that a pose? Was she not seeing herself in the becoming attitude of one who points to his bleeding heart? to whom the miseries of the world are misery, when in fact, she thought, I do not love my kind. Again she saw the ruby-splashed pavement, and faces mobbed at the door of a picture palace; apathetic, passive faces; the faces of people drugged by cheap pleasures; who had not even the courage to be themselves, but must dress up, imitate, pretend. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#184. Prompted by the sky, which seemed to make it all a little futile - what they said, what they did - she said something perfectly commonplace again. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#185. Long ago I realized that no other person would be to me what you are. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#186. I was immensely moved by this novel when I read it recently and yet I cannot think of anything to say about it except that it is wonderful. The people are not characters, there is no plot in the usual sense. What can you bring to bear: verisimilitude - to what? You can merely say over and over that it is very good, very beautiful, that when you were reading it you were happy. #Quote by Elizabeth Hardwick

#187. He felt the need for something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced amorous gales every evening about this time. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#188. When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done - people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway - in France we have Nathalie Sarraute - and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently. #Quote by Agnes Varda

#189. The light blazed out across the patch of grass; fell on the child's green bucket with the gold line round it, and upon the aster which trembled violently beside it. For the wind was tearing across the coast, hurling itself at the hills, and leaping, in sudden gusts, on top of its own back. How it spread over the town in the hollow! How the lights seemed to wink and quiver in its fury, lights in the harbour, lights in bedroom windows high up! And rolling dark waves before it, it raced over the Atlantic, jerking the stars above the ships this way and that. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#190. What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#191. Through atoms of grey-blue air the sun struck at English fields and lit up marshes and pools, a white gull on a stake, the slow sail of shadows over blunt-headed woods and young corn and flowing hayfields. It beat on the orchard wall, and every pit and grain of the brick was silver pointed, purple, fiery as if soft to touch, as if touched it must melt into hot-baked grains of dust. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#192. For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn? #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#193. All this pitting of sex against sex... All this claiming of superiority and imparting of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides', and it is... of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamented pot. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#194. But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world
a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#195. Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellow-underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us. They are hybrid creatures, neither gay like butterflies nor sombre like their own species. Nevertheless the present specimen, with his narrow hay-coloured wings, fringed with a tassel of the same colour, seemed to be content with life. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#196. It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#197. I to my friends, to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#198. Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes? when, thought Clarissa, that's the miracle, that's the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of drawers to dressing-table. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#199. As I write, there rises somewhere in my head that queer and very pleasant sense of something which I want to write; my own point of view... #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#200. The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#201. Where, indeed? Captain Vincent Reed had been born in the city of Richmond, Virginia, of northern parents who were stationed there by the telegraph company. He had attended West Point and he thought he knew something about warfare, having served under General Pope in his long and futile struggle against General Stonewall Jackson. Those men were fighters who would face the enemy till the last bullet was fired, but neither would participate in such a slaughter.
Reed had had his troops in position. He was quite prepared to rush in for the kill, and he had positioned himself so that he would be in the vanguard when his men made their charge against the guns of the young braves threatening the left flank. But when he saw that the enemy had no weapons, that even their bows and arrows were not at hand, and that he was supposed to chop down little girls and old women, he rebelled on the spot, taking counsel with no one but his own conscience. #Quote by James A. Michener

#202. On the Net, the bell curve reclaims its tails. The uncommon is as accessible as the common. The very fragmentation of the Internet allows us to find ourselves in other people - and to know that we are not alone. #Quote by Virginia Postrel

#203. In the West Indies and South America, slaves were worked to death and replaced with fresh imports, but in the continental North American colonies of Great Britain the situation was the opposite. By about 1710, as Morgan notes, "Virginia's slave population began to grow from natural increase, an unprecedented event for any New World slave population.…In 1700 Virginia had 13,000 slaves; in 1730, 40,000; in 1750, 105,000, of whom nearly 80 percent were Virginia born. #Quote by Henry Wiencek

#204. Fly high... Where the only chill that cuts through you is the wind. Where your heart pounds from exhilaration not disappointment and after ascending through cloudy wisps, brushing your wings, there is only the clear blue horizon beckoning you forth.... #Quote by Virginia Alison

#205. Science is about exploring the unknown and cannot offer guarantees. #Quote by Virginia Postrel

#206. If you default on your Visa bill, nobody comes to repossess your refrigerator or auction off your shoes. The biggest penalty you'll face is trouble getting future credit. #Quote by Virginia Postrel

#207. Thought all the wilderness of America was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showed me different. No, there is a wilderness in the East; it's the same wilderness Ben Franklin plodded in the oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as it was when George Washington was a wildbuck Indian-fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and promised to find the Gap, when Bradford built his road and men whooped her up in log cabins. There were not great Arizona spaces for the little man, just the bushy wilderness of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy. #Quote by Jack Kerouac

#208. Wherever there is one job on the verge of being lost, I will fight to save it. Wherever there is one company looking to grow in West Virginia, I will fight to make that growth a reality. #Quote by Joe Manchin

#209. The glamour of twentieth-century air travel helped to persuade once-fearful travelers to take to the skies and encouraged parochial Americans to go out and see the world. #Quote by Virginia Postrel

#210. You are the oxygen that inflames the lust in my soul... #Quote by Virginia Alison

#211. The tide of our national meanness rises incrementally, one brutalizing experience at a time, inside one person at a time in a chain of working-class Americans stretching back for decades. Back to the terror-filled nineteen-year-old girl from Weirton, West Virginia, who patrols the sweat-smelling halls of one of the empire's far-flung prisons at midnight. Back to my neighbor's eighty-year-old father, who remembers getting paid $2 apiece for literally cracking open the heads of union organizers at our textile and sewing mills during the days of Virginia's Byrd political machine. (It was the Depression and the old man needed the money to support his family.) The brutal way in which America's hardest-working folks historically were forced to internalize the values of a gangster capitalist class continues to elude the left, which, with few exceptions, understands not a thing about how this political and economic system has hammered the humanity of ordinary working people.

Much of the ongoing battle for America's soul is about healing the souls of these Americans and rousing them from the stupefying glut of commodity and spectacle. It is about making sure that they - and we - refuse to accept torture as the act of "heroes" and babies deformed by depleted uranium as the "price of freedom." Caught up in the great self-referential hologram of imperial America, force-fed goods and hubris like fattened steers, working people like World Championship Wrestling and Confederate f #Quote by Joe Bageant

#212. Enjoy the little moments, you know, those ones where you feel like screaming "I love life," from the highest mountain knowing that it will be a treasured memory... #Quote by Virginia Alison

#213. Someone in a high place - the mayor, chief of police, or other official - would receive information that a neighboring city was already in flames and that carloads of armed black men were coming to attack this city. This happened in Cedar Rapids when Des Moines was allegedly in flames. It happened in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and in Fort Worth, Texas, when it was alleged that Oklahoma City was in flames and carloads were converging on those cities. It happened in Reno and other western cities, when Oakland, California, was supposed to be in flames. It happened in Roanoke when Richmond, Virginia, was supposed to be in flames. #Quote by John Howard Griffin

#214. Nothing else in the whole wide world matters as much as avenging your sister. #Quote by Jason Jack Miller

#215. When some people retire, it's going to be mighty hard to be able to tell the difference. #Quote by Virginia Graham

#216. Feeling like a fool, he went to convince Jane to water her crabs. #Quote by Virginia Kantra

#217. As the polls began closing in the East, with states like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Virginia going for Barack Obama, it was quickly becoming clear that this would be an especially bad night for racists all across the country. #Quote by Al Franken

#218. All right," he said. "My name is Oswaldo Alexander Romero, I was born right here in Virginia, and I like romantic comedies, books about sparkling vampires, and long walks on the beach. #Quote by Jon S. Lewis

#219. I'm like a little boy from Virginia. I'm a backpacker. In my head, I'm left of centre. I come from the pool of weirdoes. #Quote by Pharrell Williams

#220. What has 32 legs and 1 tooth?'
What?' we all asked.
A West Virginia unemployment line. #Quote by Stephen Chbosky

#221. Confidence is necessary to charisma. No one's going to like the kid quietly sitting in the corner, because there's no reason to. They haven't done anything memorable or exciting. People love a trendsetter or a rebel. These #Quote by Virginia Patel

#222. On a hot day in Virginia, I know nothing more comforting than a fine spiced pickle, brought up trout-like from the sparkling depths of the aromatic jar below the stairs of Aunt Sally's cellar. #Quote by Thomas Jefferson

#223. I confess to not having listened to a word of the Declaration of Independence. At the time I barely knew the name of the author of this sublime document. I do remember hearing someone comment that since Mr. Jefferson had seen fit to pledge so eloquently our lives to the cause of independence, he might at least join us in the army. But wise Tom preferred the safety of Virginia and the excitement of local politics to the discomforts and dangers of war. #Quote by Gore Vidal

#224. Best we got, darlin'. I'll keep an emergency towel in the side compartment."

She cleaned up then refastened her jeans. "You plan on doing this again?"

He gave her a tender kiss, then drank in those blue eyes. "Eva, I plan on fucking you all over West Virginia. #Quote by Elayne DiSano

#225. The mobile middle class gravitates to the cities where housing is affordable. #Quote by Virginia Postrel

#226. There seemed no answer. He wasn't resigned to anything, he hadn't accepted or adjusted to the life he'd been forced into. Yet here he was, eight months after the plague's last victim, nine since he's spoken to another human being, ten since Virginia had died. Here he was with no future and a virtually hopeless present. Still plodding on.
Instinct? Or was he just stupid? Too unimaginative to destroy himself? Why hadn't he done it in the beginning when he was in the very depths? What had impelled him to enclose the house, install a freezer, a generator, an electric stove, a water tank, build a hothouse, a workbench, burn down the houses on each side of his, collect records and books and mountains of canned supplies, even - it was fantastic when you thought about it - even put a fancy mural on the wall?
Was the life force something more than words, a tangible, mind-controlling potency? Was nature somehow, in him, maintaining its spark against its own encroachments?
He closed his eyes. Why think, why reason? There was no answer. His continuance was an accident and an attendant bovinity. He was just too dumb to end it all, and that was about the size of it. #Quote by Richard Matheson

#227. Bill Clinton has done some incredibly reckless, irresponsible things as president. But his campaign to expand Medicare entitlements has to rank among the worst. #Quote by Virginia Postrel

#228. Internet pharmacies return to consumers the choice promised by supporters of the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. That law established federal requirements for drug safety and labeling but exempted prescription medicines from the labeling rules. #Quote by Virginia Postrel

#229. My secret world had been invaded, and the attractive figure of Tiptree - he did strike several people as attractive - was revealed as nothing but an old lady in Virginia. #Quote by Alice Hastings Bradley

#230. Modernism and feminism are two broad axes on which Woolf criticism turns, and there are many other categories that reflect the range of positions available in literary criticism more generally, such as postmodernist, psychoanalytical,
historicist, materialist, postcolonial, and so on. #Quote by Jane Goldman

#231. Whether they admit it to you, whether they admit it to themselves, people know where they stand with each other. Virginia #Quote by Catherine Ryan Hyde

#232. A tall, dark, cold eyed, warm lipped, firm chinned, young man of thirty #Quote by C.N. Williamson

#233. The day the army of Virginia allows a negro regiment to enter their lines as soldiers they will be degraded, ruined, and disgraced. #Quote by Robert Toombs

#234. Then call me Pierce because we're friends." He bent in close in the turn, eyes gleaming as they dropped to her lips. "Intimate friends, if I get my wish."
This time there was no mistaking his meaning. But he was so practiced and smooth that she couldn't help herself-she laughed. When that made him frown, she tried to suppress her amusement, but that only made her laugh harder.
"What's so funny?" he muttered.
"I'm sorry," she said, swallowing her amusement. "It's just that I've heard my brothers make such insinuations to women in that tone of voice for years, but I've never been on the receiving end."
Pierce's smile would rival that of Casanova. "I don't know why not," he said in a lazy drawl. His gaze raked her appreciatively as they swirled about the room. "Tonight, in that purple gown, you look particularly fetching. The color suits you."
"Thank you." Minerva had been trying to get her to stop wearing browns and oranges for years, but Celia had always pooh-poohed her sister's opinions. It was only after Virginia had said exactly the same thing last month that she'd begun to think she should listen. And to order new gowns accordingly.
"You're a lovely woman with the figure of a Venus and a mouth that could make a man-"
"You can stop now." Her amusement vanished. She'd be flattered if he meant a single word, but clearly this was just a game to him. "I don't need the full rogue treatment, I assure you."
Interest sparked in his eyes. "Has #Quote by Sabrina Jeffries

#235. Some people make a bad bed, they just have to lie in it. #Quote by Virginia Euwer Wolff

#236. I am not a Virginian, but an American. #Quote by Patrick Henry

#237. I love when I get to play these characters that are bigger than life. There are roles in animation that I never get to do in real life - and it appeals to my ego as an actor to play the Queen of Everything. I admit it. #Quote by Virginia Madsen

#238. If I were flying, I would travel to a perfect place. A place with frosted cakes and beautiful flowers and excellent trees to climb and absolutely no doldrums. #Quote by Kyo Maclear

#239. Say something idiotic and nobody but a dog politely wags his tail. #Quote by Virginia Graham

#240. I was born in a log cabin I built myself only the week before in the Sovereign Democratic Oligarchy of Newport News, Virginia. The end. #Quote by Ederyn Khushrenada

#241. I changed my mind about babies," Emilia said through the chatter, leaning into me. "Maybe not right now or in a few years, but down the road, I want it. I think I really want it. What do you say?"

I smirked. Emilia LeBlanc of Richmond, Virginia was asking me to put a baby in her.

Then I shrugged and leaned back into her. "Don't worry. I won't stop trying to impregnate you, even after you get pregnant."

She laughed. "Deal?" I asked. "Deal. #Quote by L.J. Shen