Quote

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

Virginia Woolf

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Virginia Woolf
Age: 59 †
Born: 1882
Born: January 25
Died: 1941
Died: March 28
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Feminist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Publisher
Short Story Writer
Writer
London
England
Virxhinia Ulf
Virginia yo juanito Adeline Woolf
Virg̔inyah Vold
Virdžiniâ Vulf
Virdzhiniia Vulf
Virzhinia Ulf
Virginia Stephen
Virzhin︠iia Ulf
Adeline Virginia Stephen
Virginyah Volf
Adeline Virginia Woolf
Virginia Adeline Woolf
Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf
Birtzinia Gulph
Virginia Stephen Woolf
Woolf
Virginia
1882-1941
Emotion
Expands
Present
Realising
Beauty
Note
History
Emotions
Beautiful
Notes
Past
Complete
Never
Thus
Time
Later
Realises

More quotes by Virginia Woolf

Image
Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.
Virginia Woolf
Image
But words have been used too often touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf.
Virginia Woolf
Image
He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.
Virginia Woolf
Image
[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
Image
The poet is always our contemporary.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Communication is truth communication is happiness. To share is our duty to go down boldly and bring to light those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased to conceal nothing to pretend nothing if we are ignorant to say so if we love our friends to let them know it.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself.
Virginia Woolf
Image
But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them.
Virginia Woolf
Image
and even a tea party means apprehension, breakage
Virginia Woolf
Image
All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.
Virginia Woolf
Image
No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.
Virginia Woolf
Image
The compensation of growing old ... was simply this that the passion remains as strong as ever, but one has gained -- at last! -- the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence -- the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.
Virginia Woolf
Image
If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of utmost importance very various heroic and mean splendid and sordid infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme as great as a man some think even greater.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations.
Virginia Woolf
Image
At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial-and any question about sex is that-one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.
Virginia Woolf
Image
I will dream today for I must unscrew my head somehow.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Tell me, he wanted to say, everything in the whole world - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how to speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depth of the sea instead?
Virginia Woolf