Virginia Woolf Quotes

Every man has a wild animal in him.

I read somewhere, one, that crying defies scientific explanation. Tears are only meant to lubricate the eyes. There is no real reason for tear glands to overproduce tears at the behest of emotion. I think we cry to release the animal parts of us without losing our humanity. Because inside of me is a beast that snarls, and growls, and strains toward freedom, toward Tobias, and, above all, towards life. And as hard as I try, I cannot kill it.

She bestowed the blessing of a wild girl's lips.

The Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.

Everything that I bear within me bound, is to be found somewhere else free.

Wild inside; raging, writhing—yes, "writhing" was the word, writhing with desire. But outwardly he was hopelessly tame; outwardly—baa, baa, baa.

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.

You feel like a prisoner if you don't create. You're jailed up inside of yourself.

The bad guys I play don't want to be bad. It's the struggle between the part of them that's an animal and the part that's the intellect that's interesting.

We all have a dinosaur deep within us just trying to get out.

Fire taps something ancient and vital in each of us, something both snarling and reverential.

There is a strange kind of human being in whom there is an eternal struggle between body and soul, animal and god, for dominance. In all great men this mixture is striking, and in none more so than in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

It's ironic, but until you can free those final monsters within the jungle of yourself, your life, your soul is up for grabs.

We are all a tiger with feelings. An elephant who never forgets. We are tiger, panther, monkey - we are all of these things, all of the life rhythms.

And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.

I was losing sight of the wolf ahead of me; the one inside me seemed closer all of a sudden.

On the surface I'm a mild mannered person, that's until you scratch the animal inside.

He that comes to Christ cannot, it is true, always get on as fast as he would. Poor coming soul, thou art like the man that would ride full gallop whose horse will hardly trot. Now the desire of his mind is not to be judged of by the slow pace of the dull jade he rides on, but by the hitching and kicking and spurring as he sits on his back. Thy flesh is like this dull jade, it will not gallop after Christ, it will be backward though thy soul and heaven lie at stake.

Onscreen, babies and animals are my inspiration. They're so alive and there and not messed up in the head the way I am.

In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.

You don't understand, you fool' says Yegor, looking dreamily up at the sky. 'You've never understood what kind of person I am, nor will you in a million years... You just think I'm a mad person who has thrown his life away... Once the free spirit has taken hold of a man, there's no way of getting it out of him.

Sometimes she has imagined what it would be like to fly, to live in the river, to run like a horse. She has dreamed of that freedom, that power, and fears the wildness in herself that wants to live as beasts live, moved purely by need and desire. She has felt torn between the heat of her limbs and the thoughts in her mind telling her to be careful and good and always calm. Don't scream or cry, don't run to him and throw yourself at his feet, pleading for him to take you in his arms, don't strip off your clothes and run naked to the water, wild with wanting.

And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?