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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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Virginia Woolf
Age: 59 †
Born: 1882
Born: January 25
Died: 1941
Died: March 28
Author
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Essayist
Feminist
Literary Critic
Novelist
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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
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Wine
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More quotes by Virginia Woolf

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Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely.
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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.
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For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?
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She felt drawing further from her and further from her an Archduke, (she did not mind that) a fortune, (she did not mind that) the safety and circumstance of married life, (she did not mind that) but life she heard going from her, and a lover.
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Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
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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.
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Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.
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I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.
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A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.
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For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn.
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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.
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To sit and contemplate - to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are.
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Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.
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Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
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Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
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I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
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A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.
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Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!
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He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.
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There was a day when I liked writing letters -- it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains.
Virginia Woolf