Quotes & Sayings About Virginia

Yes, our old age is not going to be sunny orchard drowse. By shutting down the fire curtain, though, I find I can live in the moment; which is good; why yield a moment to regret or envy or worry? Why indeed? (24 December 1940) — Virginia Woolf

All night men and women seethed up and down the well-known beats. — Virginia Woolf

Whenever you see a board up with "Trespassers will be prosecuted," trespass at once. — Virginia Woolf

The fibres of our secular hearts are bent and bowed beneath the unaccustomed tempest. — Virginia Woolf

I am in the mood to dissolve into the sky — Virginia Woolf

As I sat alone at the computer hour after hour it seemed I was learning "computers." In fact, I was learning culture. — Virginia Heffernan

Black was bestlooking ... Ebony was the best wood, the hardest wood; it was black. Virginia ham was the best ham. It was black on the outside. Tuxedos and tail coats were black and they were a man's finest, most expensive clothes. You had to use pepper to make most meats and vegetables fit to eat. The most flavorsome pepper was black. The best caviar was black. The rarest jewels were black: black opals, black pearls. — Ann Petry

Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties
one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened. — Virginia Woolf

To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently. — Virginia Woolf

to teach without zest is a crime. — Virginia Woolf

In a media culture, we not only judge strangers by how they look but by the images of how they look. So we want attractive pictures of our heroes and repulsive images of our enemies. — Virginia Postrel

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. — Michael Cunningham

The children who are 'our future' will inherit a world created not just by parental devotion but by the sort of zealous, focused endeavors that can preclude good parenting. — Virginia Postrel

But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing. — Virginia Woolf

Even the names of the books gave me food for thought. — Virginia Woolf

The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom. — Virginia Woolf

Clarissa will be bereaved, deeply lonely, but she will not die. She will be too much in love with life, with London. Virginia imagines someone else, yes, someone strong of body but frail-minded; someone with a touch of genius, of poetry, ground under by the wheels of the world, by war and government, by doctors; a someone who is, technically speaking insane, because that person sees meaning everywhere, knows that trees are sentient beings and sparrows sing in Greek. Yes, someone like that. Clarissa, sane Clarissa -exultant, ordinary Clarissa - will go on, loving London, loving her life of ordinary pleasures, and someone else, a deranged poet, a visonary, will be the one to die. — Michael Cunningham

On the whole, and providing one is in good spirits and feeling reasonably bright, it is not hard to converse for a short space of time on subjects about which one knows little, and it is indeed often amusing to see how cunningly one can steer the conversational barque, hoisting and lowering her sails, tacking this way and that to avoid reefs, and finally racing feverishly for home with the outboard engine making a loud and cheerful noise. — Virginia Graham

Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. — Virginia Woolf

There are five freedoms:
The freedom to see and hear what is;
The freedom to say what you feel and think;
The freedom to feel what you actually feel;
The freedom to ask for what you want;
The freedom to take risks on your own behalf. — Virginia Satir

What could be more absurd? Yet it is nature's folly, not ours. When she set about her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? — Virginia Woolf

I was a tomboy growing up and then fell into the world of theatre and musical theatre. A girlfriend introduced me to yoga in college and I was hooked. I didn't really know anything about it except that it was the highlight of my week. I ended up graduating from the University of Virginia and moving to Los Angeles where I could continue acting and do a yoga teacher training. I went from practicing once or twice a week to several hours everyday. I loved it. — Kathryn Budig

No one's fingerprints are exactly the same as anyone else's. — Virginia Satir

For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground. — Virginia Woolf

The clouds, warm now, sun-spotted, sweep over the hills, leaving gold in the water, and gold on the necks of the swans. — Virginia Woolf

The journey may be fraught with challenges, yet it continues, for even the smallest leaf must embrace destiny...Persistence is the key... — Virginia Alison

While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace. — Virginia Woolf

O friendship, how piercing are your darts - there, there, again there. — Virginia Woolf

Men of Virginia, countrymen of Washington, of Patrick Henry, of Jefferson, and of Madison, will ye be true to your constitutional faith? — Caleb Cushing

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind. — Virginia Woolf

One could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? — Virginia Woolf

Committee meetings are always held at inconvenient times and usually take place in dark, dusty rooms the temperatures of which are unsuited to the human body. — Virginia Graham

Average Americans order nonfat decaf iced vanilla lattes at Starbucks and choose from 1,500 drawer pulls at The Great Indoors. Amazon gives every town a bookstore with 2 million titles, while Netflix promises 35,000 different movies on DVD. Choice is everywhere - liberating to some, but to others, a new source of stress. — Virginia Postrel

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. — Virginia Woolf

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. — Kyo Maclear

Society needs both parents and nonparents, both the work party and the home party. While raising children is the most important work most people will do, not everyone is cut out for parenthood. And, as many a childless teacher has proved, raising kids is not the only important contribution a person can make to their future. — Virginia Postrel

Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels, he thought... — Virginia Woolf

But suppose Peter said to her, "Yes, yes, but your parties - what's the sense of your parties?" all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They're an offering; which sounded horribly vague. But — Virginia Woolf

The profusion of fonts is one more product of the digital revolution. Beginning in the mid-'80s and accelerating in the 1990s, type design weathered the sort of radical, technology-driven transformation that other creative industries, including music, publishing, and movies, now face. — Virginia Postrel

Every damn one of us has faults. I feel like I was dealt an especially crummy hand."

"It got ugly. I became a man possessed by inner demons that could not be caged. I was desperate for answers that were never forthcoming. Jen avoided me like the plague. She was ever fearful of the questions that I refused to voice. All of my answers poured forth deliciously from the bottle. — Virginia Aird

Take a moment and think of something small but significant that you've wanted for decades. Dream about it. Wish for it. Let the dreaming and wishing sink deeply into your being. Add some memories of disappointment just for a little flavor. At some point, over time, a wish can become too important, can become much bigger as a dream than it ever had a right to be. — Virginia M. Sanders

so that it may grow fatter and — Virginia Woolf

He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life. — Virginia Woolf

Persuasion has become a kind of force. The more the advertiser knows about what consumers want, and the more desires the product and packaging seek to fulfill, the more coercive the force. — Virginia Postrel

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. For I am by no means confining you to fiction. If you would please me - and there are thousands like me - you would write books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, and criticism and philosophy and science. By so doing you will certainly profit the art of fiction. For books have a way of influencing each other. Fiction will be much the better for standing cheek by jowl with poetry and philosophy. — Virginia Woolf

Where dreams may take you fathoms deep within the soul of the forest. Mists close in around your feathered visions, floating phantoms of days gone by, and days to come, their twirling tendrils tempting your thoughts blossom with the unbound less love and passion you hide within..... — Virginia Alison

Does housekeeping interest you at all? I think it really ought to be just as good as writing and I never see where the separation between the too comes in. At least if you must put books on one side and life on the other, each is a poor and bloodless thing; but my theory is that they mix indistinguishable. — Virginia Woolf

I've often quoted the enigmatic writer Virginia Woolf whenever any of my eight children appear to be questioning what direction to take in their lives: "Arrange whatever pieces come your way." Such great advice. Take the pieces that show up for you, and arrange them in such a way so that you live fearlessly, and the one universal Divine mind will handle all of the details for you. — Wayne W. Dyer

I luxuriate more in a whole day alone; a day of easy natural poses; slipping tranquilly off into the deep water of my own thoughts, navigating the underworld. — Virginia Woolf

It may be too late for West Virginia to save itself from the ravages of Big Coal. But it's not too late for America. — Jeff Goodell

Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion, across the page of Grimm's fairy story, while there throbbed through her, like the pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful creation. — Virginia Woolf

Simultaneously with the establishment of the Constitution, Virginia ceded to the United States her domain, which then extended to the Mississippi, and was even claimed to extend to the Pacific Ocean. — William H. Seward

Henry,that's how you get rid of fleas. You keep them from laying eggs. You go to war with them. — Jason Jack Miller

In a very short time the army of Northern Virginia was face to face with the Army of the Potomac. — James Longstreet

Sometimes it seems to me that I shall never write out all the books I have in my head, because of the strain. The devilish thing about writing is that it calls upon every nerve to hold itself taut. This is exactly what I cannot do
— Virginia Woolf

It's a mistake to lie to a librarian, you know. Some people assume we're shy and gullible, but we know how to dig up the dirt. — Virginia Lowell

But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in. — Virginia Woolf

When I worked as a prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia in the 1990s, that city, like so much of America, was experiencing horrific levels of violent crime. But to describe it that way obscures an important truth: for the most part, white people weren't dying; black people were dying. Most white people could drive around the problem. — James Comey

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. — Virginia Woolf

[Judith Shakespeare] lives in you and in me [ ... ] she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. — Virginia Woolf

They say that one must beat one's wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines — Virginia Woolf

I'm a fan. I would have been a fan of Candyman even if I hadn't been in that movie. I'm a huge fan of Star Trek, which is why I was in Star Trek: Voyager - because I begged them to be a part of that lore. — Virginia Madsen

In all the books love is one of the great facts that mould human life. But it is a catastrophe: it happens suddenly and overwhelmingly, and there is little to be said about it. — Virginia Woolf

We need to see ourselves as basic miracles. — Virginia Satir

Science is about exploring the unknown and cannot offer guarantees. — Virginia Postrel

When we have been hurt, slighted, or wounded unfairly, we are not left alone to bear it. We can get on our knees and ask for the Lord's help to forgive. — Virginia H. Pearce

And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system, so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past. — Virginia Woolf

It's the writing, not the being read, that excites me. Joy is in the doing. — Virginia Woolf

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 — Virginia Patel

By reshaping or decorating our outer selves, we express our inner sense of self: 'I like that' becomes 'I'm like that.' — Virginia Postrel

In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. — Virginia Woolf

Through other people's bodies she felt neither love nor hate distinctly. Most consciously she felt - she had drunk sweet wine at luncheon - a desire for water. "A beaker of cold water, a beaker of cold water," she repeated, and saw water surrounded by walls of shining glass. — Virginia Woolf

Unless you are rich, and can con vales center in a sanatorium estate (where visitors came down a tiered, oceanside lawn to found you ato your easel) you have to keep going when you're depressed. That means phone calls, appointments errands, holidays, family, friends, and colleagues. — Virginia Heffernan

Change was incessant, and change perhaps would never cease. High battlements of thought, habits that had seemed as durable as stone, went down like shadows at the touch of another mind and left a naked sky and fresh stars twinkling in it. — Virginia Woolf

Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them. — Virginia Woolf

You look within and upon and around me, savoring every inch. You pull my ear for no reason, and I can tell you really don't want to cry. As a tear falls between by breasts, I look away and pretend the grass is a jungle, and the ants, little kings of forgotten tribes. — Virginia Petrucci

You crawled inside my
ribs to die.

Giant becomes squirrel
becomes a dirt-wet girl

feverishly alive. — Virginia Petrucci

Southampton Row, however, is chiefly remarkable nowadays for the fact that you will always find a man there trying to sell a tortoise to a tailor. — Virginia Woolf

Steve is troubled by a lot of things. He is twenty-three, was raised in Virginia, and has the idea that California is the beginning of the end. "I feel it's insane," he says, and his voice drops. "This chick tells me there's no meaning to life but it doesn't matter, we'll just flow right out. There've been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again, at least there I had a target. At least there you expect that it's going to happen." He lights a cigarette for me and his hands shake. "Here you know it's not going to."
I ask what it is that is supposed to happen.
"I don't know," he says. "Something. Anything. — Joan Didion

Her mind was like her room, in which lights advanced and retreated, came pirouetting and stepping delicately, spread their tails, pecked their way; and then her whole being was suffused, like the room again, with a cloud of some profound knowledge, some unspoken regret, and then she was full of locked drawers, stuffed with letters, like her cabinets. — Virginia Woolf

Sure! Why should any experts be the arbiters ... That's like telling someone they can't be a vegetarian. — Virginia Johnson

The words (she was looking at the window) sounded as if they were floating like flowers on water out there, cut off from them all, as if no one had said them, but they had come into existence of themselves. "And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves." She did not know what they meant, but, like music, the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside her self, saying quite easily and naturally what had been in her mind the whole evening while she said different things. — Virginia Woolf

The Internet's abundance - of information, goods, tastes and sources of authority - creates unparalleled opportunities for individuals to get exactly what they want. But this plenitude threatens political and cultural authorities who believe in telling individuals what they can have rather than letting them choose for themselves. — Virginia Postrel

I need one, Momma, how come I don't have a baby sister?"

Rachel smiled. "You're so perfect. There was no need to ask for another."

Sophie cocked her head to the side like a puppy. "Ask who?"

"The Stork," Faith supplied.

Sophie looked thoroughly confused then. "I thought sex caused babies."

Rachel patted Faith on the back when she began to cough.

Kaycee shook her head. "Rhonda at school told me that special music causes babies. her sister told her that when her mom and dad play music in their bedroom, babies were being made. Momma, you play music in your room, but we don't have a baby."

"I don't have that particular CD, sweetie."

"My friend told me that it takes a penny and a Virginia to make a baby," Sophie said and sent Faith into another coughing fit. — Robin Alexander

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! — Francis Pharcellus Church

I am a living soap opera. — Virginia Graham

The Lake Isle
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales not too greasy,
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn'd profession of writing,
where one needs one's brains all the time. — Ezra Pound

Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the — Virginia Woolf

Stating the obvious is not interesting. — Virginia Nelson

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. — Virginia Woolf

The fairest state of them all, this tranquil and beloved domain - what has it now become? A nursery for Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. A monstrous breeding farm to supply the sinew to gratify the maw of Eli Whitney's infernal machine, cursed be that blackguard's name! In such a way is our human decency brought down, when we pander all that is in us noble and just to the false god which goes by the vile name of Capital! Oh, Virginia, woe betide thee! Woe, thrice woe, and ever damned in memory be the day when poor black men in chains first trod upon thy sacred strand! — William Styron

For several years at the University of Virginia, students had an annual tradition of raising hell around campus, burning tar barrels and shooting pistols into the air. — Matthew Pearl

Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. — Virginia Woolf

Hope is the light that flickers and burns eternally, when you remain steadfast with faith. — Virginia Martin

To use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself. — Virginia Woolf

Even now, it still bewildered Chelsea the way Virginia and her circle of picture-perfect friends had made that amazing transition - it seemed like overnight - abandoning bikes and Barbies for boys and fashion. But Chelsea hadn't been invited to cross that bridge with them. — Melody Carlson

Without Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence, there would have been no American revolution that announced universal principles of liberty. Without his participation by the side of the unforgettable Marquis de Lafayette, there would have been no French proclamation of The Rights of Man. Without his brilliant negotiation of the Louisiana treaty, there would be no United States of America. Without Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, there would have been no Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and no basis for the most precious clause of our most prized element of our imperishable Bill of Rights - the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. — Christopher Hitchens

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money. — Virginia Woolf

I was born in England and went to school there. That's when I discovered my undying passion for history - not just for the Middle Ages, but all periods of history. My favorites are medieval, Elizabethan, and Georgian; however, I've written stories set in periods as early as ancient Rome, right up to the Victorian era. — Virginia Henley

Dance music ... stirs some barbaric instinct - lulled asleep in our sober lives - you forget centuries of civilization in a second, & yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room. — Virginia Woolf