Closing the door, Claudine looked at him. She looked at him, and while he waited for some expression to come to her face he knew how a doctor must feel sometimes when he looks at a belly. For her face was no more than a cover of skin, showing nothing of the terrible, complicated things, ugly and beautiful, that were going on inside her.


Douglas Woolf

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Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even slee...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The first duty of a lecturer--to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap u...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The first duty of a lecturer is to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story o...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority an...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeate...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazing...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Language is wine upon the lips.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it mu...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the fi...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figu...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by c...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
One must love everything.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish,...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one&#...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparen...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bag...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.
LEONARD WOOLF
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman se...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hea...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want a...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury y...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty obser...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all g...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am roo...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her p...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
I rise from my worst disasters, I turn, I change.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole worl...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the sol...
VIRGINIA WOOLF
The grinding of the intellect is for most people as painful as a dentist's drill.
LEONARD WOOLF
Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
What does the brain matter compared with the heart?
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure -- the relationship so secret and private com...
VIRGINIA WOOLF