Yes Virginia Quotes & Sayings

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

Yes, yes, I'm coming. Right up the top of the house. One moment I'll linger. How the mud goes round in the mind - what a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts itself, and a gain through the eyes one sees clear and still, and there comes to the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those one nods to, the one never meets again. — Virginia Woolf

Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody - with whom? - with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I? — 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

Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it. — Virginia Woolf

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet. — Virginia Woolf

Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus. — Francis Pharcellus Church

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist. — Francis Pharcellus Church

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

She actually said with an emotion that she seldom let appear, "Let me come with you," and he laughed. He meant yes or no - either perhaps. But it was not his meaning - it was the odd chuckle he gave, as if he had said, Throw yourself over the cliff if you like, I don't care. He turned on her cheek the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupulosity. It scorched her ... — Virginia Woolf

I belong to quick, futile moments of intense feeling. Yes, I belong to moments. Not to people. — Virginia Woolf

We, as women, have this slight flaw. Yes, admitting it, we are flawed with a faultless memory in regards to the good and bad in men...Stored within our memory banks is every loving gesture and sugar coated word, thoughtful moments, places, arguments, indiscretions, lies all catalogued, timed and dated...The list, for us, is endless...
It is not our fault...You give us so much to remember... — Virginia Alison

Yes. When I want to fill my heart with His love, I open my eyes to the creations of His hand, especially the ones that seem outrageously and uselessly beautiful--sunsets, sunrises, ice crystals, patterns in drying mud, golden cottonwood leaves against red rock cliffs, the melancholy sound of the first cricket in August, moss-covered rocks in a mountain stream, the way a baby laughs before she can do useful things such as talking or walking. — Virginia H. Pearce

He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a sparkle of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type. — Virginia Woolf

His hands are caressing her skin, hips, thighs, and ass. One slips between her legs, gently stroking, opening her a little for him, and then he lifts his head and she feels it. His mouth, right there. Blair's eyes fall shut. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. She — Andrea Simonne

Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things. — Michael Cunningham

My ears were once pierced, but the tiny holes have since resealed through lack of penetration. And yes, there's another analogy in there, but let's not get off topic. — Virginia Franken

Have I never understood you, Katherine? Have I been very selfish?' 'Yes ... You've asked her for sympathy, and she's not sympathetic; you've wanted her to be practical, and she's not practical. — Virginia Woolf

What have I done to anger you, mate?"
"That. That's what you did. I'm not your mate."
He leaned in close and ran his nose up her neck, inhaling a deep breath. "Yes, you are," he whispered next to her ear. — Virginia Cavanaugh

Negotiating the adolescent stage is neither quick nor easy ... I have often said to parents, "If it isn't illegal, immoral, orfattening, give it your blessing." We do much better ... if we find and support all the places we can appropriately say yes, and say only the no's that really matter. — Virginia Satir

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour
landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ...
But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? — Virginia Woolf

And I suppose have only made myself more unpopular: ah yes: but freer. That's the point. — Virginia Woolf

What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens. One holds every phrase, every scene to the light as one reads - for Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist's integrity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! — Virginia Woolf

Her mind then was filled with tenderness and regret ... To cut an overgrown branch saddened her because it had once lived, and life was dear to her. Yes, and at the same time the fall of the branch would suggest to her how she must die herself and all the futility and evanescence of things. And then again quickly catching this thought up, with her instant good sense, she thought life had treated her well; even if fall she must, it was to lie on the earth and moulder sweetly into the roots of violets. — Virginia Woolf

What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour - landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ... — Virginia Woolf

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

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

This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs, but the violent jolt of the Capital, that is my choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity. I wish, for your sake, Leonard, I could be happy in this quietness. [pause]But if it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death.. — Virginia Woolf

Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she did not think of tears at first) which, without disturbing the firmness of her lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks. She had perfect control of herself-Oh, yes!-in every other way. — Virginia Woolf

It would be a comfort, she felt, to lean; to sit down; yes, to lie down; never, never, never to get up again. — Virginia Woolf

Yes, I miss you, I miss you. — Virginia Woolf

[Virginia] has a very sizeable collection of democrats, liberals and moonbats. (Yes, they can be separated.) — John Ringo

Virginia: Oh, you made it.
Tony: I was going to say the same to you. I've been here quite a while
Virginia: Really?
Tony: Yes, about an hour.
Virginia: I didn't know it was a race.
Tony: I didn't know that was a path. — Kathryn Wesley

Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision. — Virginia Woolf

Oh, yes, dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair. — Virginia Woolf

Well, she'd been in shock. She could've believed just about anything. The Easter Bunny, tooth fairy, Santa... Yes, Virginia, men do let you down. — Melissa Tagg

The three phases of Santa belief:
(1) Santa is real.
(2) Santa isn't real.
(3) Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. — Alton Thompson

Yes, between your shoulders, over your heads, to a landscape,' said Rhoda, 'to a hollow where the many-backed steep hills come down like birds' wings folded. There, on the short, firm turf are bushes, dark leaved, and against their darkness I see a shape, white, but not of stone, moving, perhaps alive. It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams. — Virginia Woolf

The jury had never been allowed to see any evidence that Laetrile actually worked. (Yes Virginia, they can bury medical breakthroughs in court this way also.) Dr. Kowan ... was ... age 70 ... — G. Edward Griffin

Yes, the small village that we live in, in Virginia, is a very interesting place, in terms of its Civil War history, because it was a town that was founded by Quakers in 1733. — Geraldine Brooks

A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psycho-analysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there? Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom
all these emotions I could trace and name as they succeeded each other throughout the morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes, said the sketch, anger had. — Virginia Woolf

Early in her career at Langley, Dorthy Lee was interviewed for the Daily Press, in all probability by Virginia Biggins, the female reporter assigned to Langley beat. "Do you believe," she was asked, "that women working with men have to think like a man, work like a dog, and act like a lady?" "Yes, I do," Lee said, who was mildly mortified to read her words in the Sunday paper. — Margot Lee Shetterly