Virginia Woolf People Quotations

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradles. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.

Submit to me." So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore, wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen alseep, she thought; were free like smoke, were free to come and go like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought.

For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn...

Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?

in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house ...

There are no teachers, saints, prophets, good people, but the artists.

What could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands.

I see through most people; I'm hardly ever wrong. I see at once what they've got in them.

People only become writers if they can't find the one book they've always wanted to read.

People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know.

As for 'drawing you out,' please believe I don't do such things deliberately, with an object -- It's only that I am, as a rule, far more interested in people than they are in me -- But it makes me a nuisance, I know: only an innocent nuisance.

I find that when I've seen a certain number of people my mind becomes like an old match box -- the part one strikes on, I mean.

Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself- a voice answering a voice.

No, I'm not clever. I've always cared more for people than for ideas.

I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.

Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.

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.

I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.

I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.

When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.

When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre

She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was however; there she was.

A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.

I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.

We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.

Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations ...

In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether they were beggars or people of substance.

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.

It is no use trying to sum people up.

... the random talk of people who have no chance of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often, of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which will weave itself into the moment for ever.

There is a sadness at the back of life which some people do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure.

If people are highly successful in their profession they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion.

Oh and I thought, as i was dressing, how interesting it would be to describe the approach of age, and the gradual coming of death. As people describe love. To note every symptom of failure: but why failure? To treat age as an experience that is different from the others; and to detect every one of the gradual stages towards death which is a tremendous experience, an not as unconscious, at least in its approaches, as death is.