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Books should stand on their own feet ... If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady.

Virginia Woolf

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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
Feet
Preface
Stand
Introduction
Books
Steady
Order
Table
Book
Tables
Need
Legs
Right
Exist
Needs
Paper
Shoring

More quotes by Virginia Woolf

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The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.
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For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.
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But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.
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To communicate is our chief business society and friendship our chief delights and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.
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I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices
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Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
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Finally, I would thank, had I not lost his name and address, a gentleman in America, who has generously and gratuitously corrected the punctuation, the botany, the entomology, the geography, and the chronology of previous works of mine and will, I hope, not spare his services on the present occasion.
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If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?
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But how entirely I live in my imagination how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.
Virginia Woolf
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Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's or she purred.
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To be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.
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Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.
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There is a coherence in things, a stability something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.
Virginia Woolf
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I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely.
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The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
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My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.
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Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.
Virginia Woolf
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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
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Above all you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world.
Virginia Woolf
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How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?
Virginia Woolf