“There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay…. the essay must be pure–pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favours his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that time, the shadow in which the detail of so many things can be discerned which the glare of day flattens out, the depth, the richness, the calm, the humour of the whole pageant–all this seems to have been his natural atmosphere and his most abiding mood.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“…it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
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“Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Humor
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“There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Intelligence
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“Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Business
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“The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Beauty
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“Let a man get up and say, “Behold, this is the truth,” and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Truth
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“Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
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“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Writing
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“We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Writing
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“The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
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“As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Women
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“Humor is the first gift to perish in a foreign language.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
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“That great Cathedral space which was childhood.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
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“Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
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“To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Self-control
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“To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.”
Virginia Woolf
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
