Quote

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

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
Hollowness
Hardness
Strain
Sent
Body
Heart
Wrung

More quotes by Virginia Woolf

Image
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
Virginia Woolf
Image
For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.
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
The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.
Virginia Woolf
Image
We [women] have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that ... takes time.
Virginia Woolf
Image
London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... To walk alone through London is the greatest rest.
Virginia Woolf
Image
every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.
Virginia Woolf
Image
In the 18th century we knew how everything was done, but here I rise through the air, I listen to voices in America, I see men flying- but how is it done? I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.
Virginia Woolf
Image
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
Image
That complete statement which is literature.
Virginia Woolf
Image
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
Image
The poet is always our contemporary.
Virginia Woolf
Image
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Does Nature supplement what man advanced? Or does she complete what he began?
Virginia Woolf
Image
Wat a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.
Virginia Woolf
Image
She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.
Virginia Woolf