Virginia Woolf, Orlando Quotes

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.

He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

. . . clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.

By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.

Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?

Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.

All the time she writing the world had continued.

He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line.

But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.

the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string

Thoughts are divine.

For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.

All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.