Virginia Woolf Quotes

First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.

We need words to name and designate things. But we have only a static language with which to express ourselves.

A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

My method is to find a word with a gesture.

Let me say no more. Words do no justice to the hidden meaning. Everything immediately becomes slightly different when it is expressed in words, a little bit distorted, a little foolish...It is perfectly fine with me that what for one man is precious wisdom for another sounds like foolery.

words can never get at the truth.

Language is the most beautiful and destructive thing because it allows you to express yourself, but it totally confuses everything.

I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.

All I want to do is give the world my heart... Record label tryina make me compromise my art.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

Stop giving your power away and begin to trust that your feelings are in fact expressions of the deepest truths.

Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.

We form ourselves within the vocabularies that we did not choose, and sometimes we have to reject those vocabularies, or actively develop new ones.

Poetry is music written for the human voice.

Nobody else can make the sound you make.

...writing is not a performance but a generosity.

For me music is so passionate. I have to give it my all every time I go onstage.

One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.

Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.

Acting is the great love of my life. It gives you permission to use all parts of yourself. Permission to be the hero, the love interest, the comedian, the villain. Transformation excites me. So does truth. Nothing is more thrilling, hilarious, and tragic than the truth. Those things motivated me to become an actor. Also, they always have the best food on set.

The First Amendment guarantees liberty of human expression in order to preserve in our Nation what Mr. Justice Holmes called a "free trade in ideas." To that end, the Constitution protects more than just a man's freedom to say or write or publish what he wants. It secures as well the liberty of each man to decide for himself what he will read and to what he will listen. The Constitution guarantees, in short, a society of free choice.

Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.

A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma.

Music gives the soul this inner self-expression, a voice. It gives the soul a sound, the sound of the Muse.