Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body? — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“...who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?” — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Some people go to priests; others to poetry...I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken.” — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking. ― Virginia Woolf, The Waves” — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom.” — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Tell me", he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“You wish to be a poet; you wish to be a lover. But the splendid clarity of your intelligence, and the remorseless… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. ... Women, then, have not… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated,… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“(W)hy is poetry wholly an elderly taste? When I was twenty I could not for the life of me read Shakespeare for… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Yet it is true that there was an absent mindedness about her which sometimes made her clumsy; she was apt to think… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Or there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose he had had that passion, and had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Married against their will, kept in one room, and to one occupation, how could a dramatist give a full or interesting or… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
We read Charlotte Bronte not for exquisite observation of character - her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy - hers… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now and again… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“What poets, I cried aloud, as one does in the dusk, what poets they were! In a sort of jealousy, I suppose,… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“For one day as I leant over a gate that led into a field, the rhythm stopped: the rhymes and the hummings,… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Shakespeare could not have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had time to read them. Alas! even the books that had been given her,… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“She was married, true; but if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Here is Lady Winchilsea, for example, I thought, taking down her poems. She was born in the year 1661; she was noble… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“The train slows and lengthens, as we approach London, the centre, and my heart draws out too, in fear, in exaltation. I am about… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side all is correct, definite, orderly; the paths… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Other worshipful objects were content with worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but this form, were it only the shape of… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“Sometimes he woke with a brain like lead; at others it was as if a thousand wax tapers were alight and people were throwing… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life -… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age. — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
Love ought to stop on both sides, don’t you think, simultaneously?’ He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
“What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! (...) I think I could happily live here & read forever.” — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
