Poetry Quote by Virginia Woolf — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“the battered woman--for she wore a skirt--with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love--love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death's enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over.”

“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?”

“When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.”

“It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.”

“To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.”

“The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking”

“All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.”

“Even the most political poem is an act of faith.”

“I wrote too many poems in a language I did not yet know how to speak”

“Only my books anoint me,”

“True and false fears let us refrain,”