Quotes for English Learners
Quotes by
Virginia Woolf
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The author of the following quotes:
Virginia Woolf
Quotes by
Virginia Woolf :
A good essay A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
Virginia Woolf |
writing
A masterpiece A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.
Virginia Woolf |
writing
A writer and his work Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
Virginia Woolf |
writing
Anon I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Virginia Woolf |
men and women
As a woman As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
Virginia Woolf |
men and women
Books This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
Virginia Woolf |
war and peace
Depend upon a profession To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
Virginia Woolf |
work
Dress and war The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
Virginia Woolf |
war and peace
Fiction Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
Virginia Woolf |
writing
Finding peace You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
Virginia Woolf |
life
For most of history For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
Virginia Woolf |
men and women
Friendliness with women If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?
Virginia Woolf |
men and women
God I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.
Virginia Woolf |
religion
Human nature Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
Virginia Woolf |
art
I like women The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
Virginia Woolf |
men and women
If one has not dined well One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
Virginia Woolf |
food
In a queer mood I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.
Virginia Woolf |
writing
In idleness, in dreams It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Virginia Woolf |
truth
Indecency The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
Virginia Woolf |
life
It is wine Language is wine upon the lips.
Virginia Woolf |
language
Mental fight Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
Virginia Woolf |
truth
My friends Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Virginia Woolf |
friendship
Only the title Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.
Virginia Woolf |
friendship
Poetry and prose Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
Virginia Woolf |
writing
Preventing war We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.
Virginia Woolf |
war and peace
Temperate happiness The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
Virginia Woolf |
happiness
The beautiful The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
Virginia Woolf |
weakness
The creative power Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
Virginia Woolf |
creativity
The emancipation The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
Virginia Woolf |
men and women
The poet's heart Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
Virginia Woolf |
men and women
To be a man or a woman? It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
Virginia Woolf |
men and women
To enjoy freedom To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
Virginia Woolf |
freedom
To value life more Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
Virginia Woolf |
life
To write fiction A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf |
men and women
Twice its natural size Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
Virginia Woolf |
men and women
Two edges The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Virginia Woolf |
humor
What is life? Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
Virginia Woolf |
life
Why? Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
Virginia Woolf |
men and women
You cannot tell it! If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
Virginia Woolf |
truth
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