Róisín Mulliez > Róisín's Quotes

“Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
― Virginia Woolf

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own / Three Guineas

“Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”
― Virginia Woolf

“She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual”
― Virginia Woolf

“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer? ”
― Virginia Woolf

“She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

“They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort.”
― Virginia Woolf

“It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters

“Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art”
― Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Four: 1931-1935

“How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?”
― Virginia Woolf

“She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

“I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married”
― Virginia Woolf

“I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young—alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross–roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to–night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting–room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky. too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would he impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own