Virginia Woolf Best Quotes & Sayings

It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Over the centuries, this interpretation and reinterpretation creates a long chain connecting a writer to all future readers- who frequently read each other as well as the original. Virginia Woolf had a beautiful vision of generations interlinked in this way: of how "minds are threaded together- how any live mind is of the very same stuff as Plato's & Euripides ... It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind." This capacity for living on through readers' inner worlds over long periods of history is what makes a book like the 'Essays' a true classic. As it is reborn differently in each mind, it also brings those minds together. — Sarah Bakewell

She pulled off Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and settled down in a comfortable leather chair by the fire to read. — Lucinda Riley

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

Theodore Finch leans against an SUV, hands in pockets, like he has all the time in the world and he expects me. I think of the Virginia Woolf lines, the ones from The Waves: Pale, with dark hair, the one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here. — Jennifer Niven

Lord, how unutterably disgusting life is! What dirty tricks it plays us, one moment free; the next, this. Here we are among the breadcrumbs and the stained napkins again. That knife is already congealing with grease. Disorder, sordidity and corruption surrounds us. We have been taking into our mouths the bodies of dead birds. It is with these greasy crumbs, slobbering over napkins, and little corpses that we have to build. Always it begins again; always there is the enemy; eyes meeting ours; fingers twitching ours; the effort waiting. Call the waiter. Pay the bill. We must pull ourselves up out of the chairs. We must find our coats. We must go. Must, must, must - detestable word. Once more, I who had thought myself immune, who had said, "Now I am rid of all that", find that the wave has tumbled me over, head over heels, scattering my possessions, leaving me to collect, to assemble, to head together, to summon my forces, rise and confront the enemy. — Virginia Woolf

Katherine, who tried so hard in London to be best friends with Virginia Woolf, who hated her, because Katherine was the kind of naif-imbecile that the literary men adored and championed at her expense. — Chris Kraus

Meanwhile, let us abolish the ticking of time's clock with one blow. Come closer. — Virginia Woolf

On January 18, 1915, six months into the First World War, as all Europe was convulsed by killing and dying, Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, 'The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.' Dark, she seems to be saying, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. Or we transform the future's unknowability into something certain, the fulfillment of all our dread, the place beyond which there is no way forward. Be again and again, far stranger things happen than the end of the world. — Rebecca Solnit

The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it would lose its poetry. A little more - and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book. — E. M. Forster

Something radically new, the producer tells me. Think Virginia Woolf with dead bodies and car chases. — James Sallis

Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C.S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? You forget. But it has always worried you that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn. — Kevin Brockmeier

I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in the letters of such people as Joyce and Virginia Woolf. — Michel Faber

The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. — Virginia Woolf

Dostoevsky does not exist for me. Virginia Woolf does not exist for me. Her essays are quite good, but her novels are not of much interest for me. And Joyce. His stories are wonderful, but his novels are too artificial, even pompous. I have heard some writers say, When I read Kafka or Flaubert or Dostoevsky, I think, why should I write? He is so good. For me, writers like Kafka are so closed they don't allow you to follow them, whereas someone like Shakespeare leaves many paths unexplored, many things just announced, strong images unexplained - these invite you not to follow him but to be inspired. He inspires me. — Javier Marias

And just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf which I bought with a battery of her novels Saturday with Ted. And she works off her depression over rejections from Harper's (no less! - and I hardly can believe that the Big Ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock & sausage. Bless her. I feel my life linked to her, somehow. I love her. — Sylvia Plath