“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next. ”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy - to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour
to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my
world.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“And you wish to be a poet; and you wish to be a lover.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe
that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie
asleep.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated
faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the
features from faces. People might walk through me. And what is
this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found
myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar - forest trees or
the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel;
our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth
naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these
pavements are shells, bones and silence.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“...But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful...”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from The Waves
“We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones -- those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.”
― Susan Sontag, quote from The Volcano Lover: A Romance
“They say in the east you love the person you marry and in the west you marry the person you love. But maybe it's a lot simpler than that. Maybe you just love the person you love.”
― Tanuja Desai Hidier, quote from Born Confused
“Before Elfrida Phipps left London for good and moved to the country, she made a trip to Battersea Dogs' Home, and returned with a canine companion. It took a good, and heart-rending, half hour of searching, but as soon as she saw him, sitting very close to the bars of his kennel and gazing up at her with dark and melting eyes, she knew he was the one. She did not want a large animal, nor did she relish the idea of a yapping lap dog. This one was exactly the right size. Dog size.”
― Rosamunde Pilcher, quote from Winter Solstice
“Look at us. One bleeding body, one corpse, and a husk who's been half dead for years. No one who took an objective look at this room could think it was anything but too late, Ruth. For all of us.”
― Sophie Hannah, quote from The Other Half Lives
“The point is not to find the average customer but to find early adopters: the customers who feel the need for the product most acutely. Those customers tend to be more forgiving of mistakes and are especially eager to give feedback.”
― Eric Ries, quote from The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.