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Literary Critic Inspirational Quotes (30051)

Page 42 of 1253
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So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.
Virginia Woolf
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To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!
Virginia Woolf
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As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.
Virginia Woolf
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As nobody can possibly tell me whether one's writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one's own pleasure. I am sure of that.
Virginia Woolf
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Speech is an old torn net, through which the fish escape as one casts it over them.
Virginia Woolf
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You cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind.
Virginia Woolf
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For nothing was simply one thing.
Virginia Woolf
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Alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity a freedom which the attached can never know
Virginia Woolf
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[Final diary entry:] Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it's seven and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.
Virginia Woolf
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Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.
Virginia Woolf
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To love makes one solitary.
Virginia Woolf
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Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves but to make people think this or that perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.
Virginia Woolf
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... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bullyher, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
Virginia Woolf
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She felt, with her hand on the nursery door, that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically (the feeling was one of relief and happiness) it was all one stream.
Virginia Woolf
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It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred.
Virginia Woolf
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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
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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
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madam, the man cried, leaping to the ground, you're hurt! I'm dead, sir! she replied. A few minutes later, they became engaged.
Virginia Woolf
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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
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Envy, like a cold prison, benumbs and stupefies and, conscious of its own impotence, folds its arms in despair.
Jeremy Collier
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It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of woman's life is that.
Virginia Woolf
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Men felt a chill in their hearts a damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth,one subterfuge was tried after anothersentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics.
Virginia Woolf
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It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.
Virginia Woolf
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The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom.
Virginia Woolf
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