Quote

We seem to be riding on the top of the highest mast of the tallest ship and yet at the same time we know that nothing of this sort matters love is not proved thus, nor great achievements completed thus so that we sport with the moment and preen our feathers in it lightly.

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
Time
Sort
Riding
Tallest
Love
Sports
Ships
Masts
Moment
Sport
Completed
Moments
Thus
Lightly
Seems
Achievement
Achievements
Nothing
Matters
Feathers
Matter
Highest
Proved
Great
Seem
Ship
Mast

More quotes by Virginia Woolf

Image
I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Does Nature supplement what man advanced? Or does she complete what he began?
Virginia Woolf
Image
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
Image
I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement.
Virginia Woolf
Image
I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me.
Virginia Woolf
Image
What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.
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
But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter!
Virginia Woolf
Image
As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?
Virginia Woolf
Image
A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.
Virginia Woolf
Image
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
Image
To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.
Virginia Woolf
Image
I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments.
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
She thought there were no Gods no one was to blame and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.
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
But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
Virginia Woolf
Image
Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours.
Virginia Woolf