# Quote — Virginia Woolf, Orlando

> At the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading Greene's Visit to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven poetical works, only retaining 'The Oak Tree', which was his boyish dream and very short. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush were the whole of it.

- Author: [Virginia Woolf](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf.md)
- Book: [Orlando](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/orlando.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf#Orlando:_A_Biography_(1928)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/orlando/at-the-age

## More from this book

> Something, perhaps, we must believe in, and as Orlando, we have said, had no belief in the usual divinities she bestowed her credulity upon great men — yet with a distinction. Admirals, soldiers, statesmen, moved her not at all. But the very thought of a great writer stirred her to such a pitch of belief that she almost believed him to be invisible. Her instinct was a sound one. One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/orlando/something-perhaps-we-must.md)

> Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/orlando/old-madame-du-deffand.md)

> Green in nature is one thing, green in in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/orlando/green-in-nature.md)