Virginia Woolf Quotes

Speech is our second possession, after the soul-and perhaps we have no other possession in this world.

I act as the tongue of you, ... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened.

Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

After my recent brush with voicelessness, I thought I'd share with you a few thoughts about speech. Don't take it lightly my friends. If music is the pathway to the heart as Voltaire suggested, then speech is the pathway to other people. Live in silence and you live alone.

He mouths a sentence as curs mouth a bone.

Common fluency of speech in many men and most women is owing to a scarcity of matter.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

Yes, time can be buoyed by wordlessness, but it needs to be anchored in words.

Inevitably, almost everything we say is either quotation or paraphrase.

For me, speaking is work. It's not like when you breathe.

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

Speech is the small change of silence.

Thought is made in the mouth.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

It's funny because I've made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it.

We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns. You have never spoken before.

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictions word, preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.

Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.

The tongue of man is a twisty thing, there are plenty of words there of every kind.

It's not what enters men's mouth that is evil," said the alchemist. It's what comes out of their mouths that is.

Thy words, I grant are bigger, for I wear not, my dagger in my mouth.

Speaking is a beautiful folly; with that man dances over all things.