Q - Virginia Woolf
Posted on 28th January 2021
Adeline Virginia Woolf 1882 – 1941 was an English writer, essayist, publisher and critic, who along with her husband founded the Hogarth Press which published much of her own work.
‘What does the brain matter, compared with the heart?’
‘My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable day’
‘Books are the mirrors of the soul’
‘If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people’
‘Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame’
‘To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination’
‘You cannot find peace by avoiding life’
‘He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life’
‘It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels!’
‘No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high’
‘Fiction must stick to facts, the truer the facts the better the fiction’
‘A perfect treat must include a trip to a second-hand bookshop’
‘I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps, to be locked in’
‘Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement’
‘Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others’
‘Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself’
‘It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: One must be a woman manly or a man womanly’
‘I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life’
‘The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark’
‘The only advice… that one person can give about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions’
‘Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth’
‘I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky’
‘A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living’
‘No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself’
‘Marvellous are the innocent’
‘The mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions’
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