Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Quotes

• “A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying...”
• “A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks...”
• “The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took h...”
• “No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at ...”
• “For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which...”
• “For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge ...”
• “Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring th...”
• “For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the f...”
• “The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the you...”
• “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 ...”
• “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?”
• “Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.”
• “Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”
• “He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”
• “Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.”