Virginia Woolf A Room Of Ones Own Quotes & Sayings

Why was it that relations between different people were so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so dangerous ... What had Evelyn really wished to say to him? What was she feeling left alone in the empty hall? The mystery of life and the unreality even of one's own sensations overcame him as he walked down the corridor which led to his room. — Virginia Woolf

Think of me, the uneducated child reading books in my room at 22 Hyde Park Gate
now advanced to this glory ... Yes; all that reading, I say, has borne this odd fruit. And I am pleased. — Virginia Woolf

No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion. — Virginia Woolf

To pursue the thing she needed to do, Virginia Woolf wrote, "a woman must have money and a room of her own ... " I needed money and a backpack. — Elisabeth Eaves

She left the room without looking in the glass. From which we deduce the fact, he said to himself, as if he were writing a novel, that Miss Sarah Pargiter has never attracted the love of men. Or had she? He did not know. These little snapshot pictures of people left much to be desired, these little surface pictures that one made, like a fly crawling over a face, and feeling, here's the nose, here's the brow. — Virginia Woolf

The room grew suddenly several degrees darker, for the wind seemed to be driving waves of darkness across the earth. No one attempted to eat for a time, but sat looking out at the garden, with their forks in the air. The flashes now came frequently, lighting up faces as if they were going to be photographed, surprising them in tense and unnatural expressions. — Virginia Woolf

I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms. — Virginia Woolf

All artists need a room of their own — Virginia Woolf

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance ( ... ); as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out [in his History of England], she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room. — Virginia Woolf

Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing; often overpowering the solitary traveller and taking away from him the sense of the earth, the wish to return, and giving him for substitute a general peace, as if (so he thinks as he advances down the forest ride) all this fever of living were simplicity itself; and myriads of things merged in one thing; and this figure, made of sky and branches as it is, had risen from the troubled sea (he is elderly, past fifty now) as a shape might be sucked up out of the waves to shower down from her magnificent hands, compassion, comprehension, absolution. So, he thinks, may I never go back to the lamplight; to the sitting-room; never finish my book; never knock out my pipe; never ring for Mrs. Turner to clear away; rather let me walk on to this great figure, who will, with a toss of her head, mount me on her streamers and let me blow to nothingness with the rest. — Virginia Woolf

But she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton's face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered, and felt often as she stood hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room, an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a diver before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens beneath him, and the waves which threaten to break, but only gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust — Virginia Woolf

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. — Virginia Woolf

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

And she came in from the little room. — Virginia Woolf

And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial." And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. 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

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 ... — Virginia Woolf

She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was however; there she was. — Virginia Woolf

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

Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in the room and through the waves came the voices of birds singing. — Virginia Woolf

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. — Virginia Woolf

He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing. If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him; however deep he buried himself or climed high, not for a second should he find himself without her. So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy. — Virginia Woolf

And then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart. — Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was wrong. You do not need a room of your own to write. — Julia Glass

If only he could be alone in his room working, he thought, among his books. That was where he felt at his ease. — Virginia Woolf

Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred. — Virginia Woolf

I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases. — Virginia Woolf

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. — Virginia Woolf

Why, I ask, can I not finish the letter that I am writing? For my room is always scattered with unfinished letters. I begin to suspect, when I am with you, that I am among the most gifted of men. I am filled with the delight of youth, with potency, with the sense of what is to come. blundering, but fervid, I see myself buzzing round flowers, humming down scarlet cups, making blue funnels resound with my prodigious booming. How richly I shall enjoy my youth (you make me feel). And London. And freedom. But stop. You are not listening. You are making some protest, as you slide, with an inexpressibly familiar gesture, your hand along your knee. By such signs we diagnose our friends' diseases. "Do not, in your affluence and plenty," you seem to say, "pass me by." "Stop," you say. "Ask me what I suffer. — Virginia Woolf

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. — Virginia Woolf

TYPICAL TROLOLOL: "Sure, but even Virginia Woolf said in A Room of One's Own that 'a woman must have money,' so obviously all girls are just out for cash. — Sam Maggs