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
Related But she never thought about the way Terrible looked, at least not that way. He hadn’t been ugly to... STACIA KANE She watched him, her head angled. He sometimes felt that she looked at him the way a cat regards a m... SARAH J. MAAS But when he looked at her—and she looked at him—they both knew that there was something worse th... KRISTIN HANNAH She had no mercy. He looked at her neck and thought how he would like to jab it with the knife he ha... W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM There was no Jace Wayland more real than the one he saw in her eyes when she looked at him. CASSANDRA CLARE And when she started becoming a “young lady,” and no one was allowed to look at her because she ... STEPHEN CHBOSKY He moved closer to her, his face just inches away from her. They stood motionless. Jason looked deep... MARK A. COOPER She liked to imagine that when she passed, the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymo... ALICE SEBOLD And how different her face looked the first time she really liked a boy who was not on a poster on h... STEPHEN CHBOSKY Occupied in observing Mr. Bingley’s attentions to her sister, Elizabeth was far from suspecting th... JANE AUSTEN He looked at her and tilted his head very slightly in wonder. He had forgotten, as he always forgot,... MEGAN WHALEN TURNER She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their dar... CORMAC MCCARTHY He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still ca... JAMES JOYCE Witch Baby wanted to ask Ping how to find her Jah-Love angel. She knew Raphael was not him, even tho... FRANCESCA LIA BLOCK And then there was her face: her white skin, her brown eyes, and her expression, so soft and beautif... NATSUO KIRINO Yes. He saw her in his mind, exactly as she was. She bore him company with her pride, resentment, ha... CHARLES DICKENS The woman was silent, her eyes on the floor. Shimamura had come to a point where he knew he was only... YASUNARI KAWABATA He almost said to himself that he did not like her, before their conversation ended; he tried so har... ELIZABETH GASKELL Amy pulls away and looks into my face. Her pale skin is blotchy red, her eyes are veined and shadowe... BETH REVIS The defendant put a handgun to the head of the female victim ... and told her he would kill her if s... DEBBIE CARTER He had no idea how wonderful he was. How his hands were so beautiful she could hardly look at them. ... CAMMIE MCGOVERN She looked into the mirror, wiping the mascara that was running down her cheeks with her tears and s... AKSHAY VASU She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a ... LILY KING How can I describe Peter's face, the pieces of him that stick to my heart? Peter sometimes looked al... JODI LYNN ANDERSON His hands tightened on her shoulders as the truth washed over him. My God, she really had told him y... CAROLYN JEWEL He wanted her. He knew where to find her. He waited. It amused him to wait, because he knew that the... AYN RAND The little group before her finally moved on and Sarah took its place, standing before Tom like he w... BONNIE DEE You're not the way everyone says you are," Kaye said, looking at him so fiercely that he couldn't me... HOLLY BLACK He laughed and was about to retort when she grabbed his collar and pulled him into her. She clamped ... DEREK LANDY No one should ever feel bad about themselves when the hot guy talks to the ugly girl instead. There'... JOY MANISCALCO And when he winked at her, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that from that moment on, she wo... PRISCILLA GLENN Come on," Cole said. He looked back over his shoulder at Mr. Brisbane, who was looking at me with a ... MAGGIE STIEFVATER He looked down at himself and laughed softly. ‘‘My dark side dresses better than I do.’’ He ... RACHEL CAINE Oh I bet you’re sweet as under all that posh.’ And he looked at her in a way that left her... AMY ANDREWS He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for... LEO TOLSTOY She turned to look at him, and he was already looking at her. “I’m going to miss you when I wake... MARIE RUTKOSKI There," she said, waving her hands at the corridor. The expression of delight on her face was a very... NEIL GAIMAN Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more t... GRAHAM GREENE He cupped his hand around her cheek, and she marveled at how perfectly his palm fit her cheek. His f... SUMMER HINES I miss him,” she whispered, her voice cracking. His heart constricted at the grief on her fa... KAYLEA CROSS A footman knocked at the door, the sound echoing through the entrance hall. The sisters looked... LISA KLEYPAS She knew she was in love with him. She loved everything about him too. He was more than a fantasy. F... DEBORAH ARMSTRONG Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage's arm and pressed it, limp, against her side.... ALDOUS HUXLEY And she was not beautiful asleep. Her expression slack and not angelic. The very ordinariness of it ... STEVEN R. BOYETT He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her,... GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he ca... MICHAEL ONDAATJE She didn’t know how long they stood on that roof, tangled up in each other, mouths and hands rovin... SARAH J. MAAS Raven stared up at his face, drinking in the strong lines and the way he looked at her with somethin... CHRISTINE FEEHAN She struggled against him and then kicked him with her knee, right between his legs. He won’t be t... AMBER M. KESTNER My mother looked back at me while my father drove. Her long auburn hair was shimmering in the flicke... ZARA STEEN Sometime during high school he’d gotten . . . kind of . . . beautiful, and Harper found it easier ... SUMMER HINES There was an infinitesimal pause while he watched her face, as though he half expected her to recogn... LEE WILKINSON He had come for her. He had promised everything was going to be okay, and he had come for her, and h... THEA HARRISON He then kissed her. It was a very long time before he let her go. When he did, she looked... EVA IBBOTSON How can I judge?" she said at last. "To me, he is a hero. To the world a monster." She let her head ... ROBERT FANNEY What are you?' She asked. He shot her a brief glance and looked away. He stared at the scenery of th... SHIRLEY A. MARTIN Deandre gazed at her like she was the stars, and he was a mere astronomer, searching her face for th... AISHABELLA SHEIKH Vikus looked at Luxa and opened his arms. She stood, still frozen, staring at him as if he were a co... SUZANNE COLLINS There ya are.” Erik grinned at her as he came bounding down the steps two at a time. He stepped ar... MICHELLE M. PILLOW It was about 1951. She had written me and said he was very special and he thought she was very speci... EDYTHE SCOTT BAGLEY The rage of the Beast Lord was a terrible thing to behold. Some people stormed, some punched things,... ILONA ANDREWS He knew her and she was very kind to him. They were neighbors. And clearly, she was mortified at wha... LORI WADA He did not speak; merely looked at her with an expression she had seen traces of before but never fu... ANNE FORTIER He's charmed by her as if she were some fairy!" continued Arabella. "See how he looks round at her, ... THOMAS HARDY She looked at me, she rolled her eyes back, a tear came down her face and she died in my arms. EDWIN REYES Valentine whirled. Clary, lying half-conscious in the sand, her wrists and arms a screaming agony, s... CASSANDRA CLARE You were dancing with Yuki and I looked at you. And you turned away and held her closer. Why did you... APRILYNNE PIKE She saw how he was staring at it, the bright red hue beneath her bonnet. She could not bear to see t... CHARLOTTE FEATHERSTONE It was once him and her, but she lost him and thought for a long time she wanted him back more then ... AMBER He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her full on the mouth. His skin was wet with rain. When... CORNELIA FUNKE It was her last breakfast with Bapi, her last morning in Greece. In her frenetic bliss that kept her... ANN BRASHARES There was nothing special with the way he looked at her but her heart raced even with a glance. PUSHPA RANA Then he led her to sit by him on a fallen gum trunk, smooth and white, and he leaned to whisper in h... KATE MORTON He firmly pulled her body against his and he brushed her lips with his. Staring into her eyes, he li... LANEY SMITH He told her he was going to rip her laundry off and do dirty things to her, ... She asked him when h... FRANK MINUCCI Everytime he looked at her she felt brighter inside, and she yearned to keep his attention, to hold ... JESSICA KHOURY Owen folded his arms around Morgan to steady her when she crashed into him, and was enveloped by her... KRISTEN CASEY He called her when he was alone and told her he was going to prison for a long time and the police h... GERRY HARRINGTON If she could take my strength. He put his hand on his chest, feeling his heartbeat. If she could hav... JAN HOLLY All of a sudden, she was there, breaking away from the little group of women and running toward him.... BONNIE DEE She paused, frowning at him. But his eyes drifted to the small wooden door just a few feet away. A b... SARAH J. MAAS Before I go," he said, and paused -- "I may kiss her?" It was remembered afterwards that ... CHARLES DICKENS Inej turned to go. Kaz seized her hand, keeping it on the railing. He didn't look at her. "Stay", he... LEIGH BARDUGO Her eyes, always sad, now looked into the mirror with particular hopelessness. "She's flattering me,... LEO TOLSTOY Cash looked at her, square in the eye, and his jaw twitched. She flinched, then braced herself. For ... SUMMER HINES The death of her father and mother and the rich acres of and that had come down to her had set a tra... SHERWOOD ANDERSON He was ruining it. Five minutes before, he’d looked at her with desire and she’d thought finally... ARIELLE HUDSON She would tell him what she wanted in her life--her hopes and dreams for the future--and he would li... NICHOLAS SPARKS While this is all very amusing, the kiss that will free the girl is the kiss that she most desires,�... CASSANDRA CLARE She reached out and touched the king’s face, cupping his cheek in her hand. “Just a nightma... MEGAN WHALEN TURNER How was it that he haunted her imagination so persistently? What could it be? Why did she care for w... ELIZABETH GASKELL She shivered as he left her to go to the fire, and find water and cloths. He leaned into the light, ... KRISTIN CASHORE He pulled her close kissing her mouth taking her by surprise. He stepped back passion smoldering in ... AMANDA STEPHAN Melody began to mumble incomprehensibly under her breath as she worked frantically on securing her m... B.M.B. JOHNSON When silence greeted her question, she looked at Caine—for that was how he saw himself in that mom... V.S. CARNES He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD A nod at Beatrice who held absolutely still. "She said she would come with me. She insisted on it. S... METTE IVIE HARRISON And the more he gazed at her, the more he felt a twinge of something he couldn’t quite describe, a... J.L. SHEPPARD She looked like she was dying. Her hands were black, her lips were black, her face was purple. BRIAN HAUSLER What came to mind was a dinosaur. A tiny velociraptor, no bigger than her thumb. Relatively sma... MARISSA MEYER
More Douglas Woolf
Lured by smooth roads onto a new turnpike, he read with surprise the rules he was handed, don't stop... DOUGLAS WOOLF Twentyone is too old to go anywhere alone, you know that. I want to go with someone. I don't mean as... DOUGLAS WOOLF At the high school a pretty girl strolled across the parking lot to her black stallion, let her ciga... DOUGLAS WOOLF Yet he could not enjoy the walk. In the morning especially a bougainvillaea looks handmade, lawns ar... DOUGLAS WOOLF With such luck as this, he rode the beast in the jaunty way that she deserved, back north, seemingly... DOUGLAS WOOLF Are you the owner of this car?" A cop has something you don't have, something you gave him earlier.<... DOUGLAS WOOLF Pete offered tobacco and paper, but Claude brought out his cigarettes and they both decided to try t... DOUGLAS WOOLF He awoke on the desert gliding at seventyfive, to see a single great headlight topping a rise not fa... DOUGLAS WOOLF ... family men, Claude." "Then why aren't they home with their families?" "Yo... DOUGLAS WOOLF Outside he hurried again, for he had several blocks to walk and the beer turned out to be no more th... DOUGLAS WOOLF He must have pressed the wrong button, or several of them, for when the door fretted open he found h... DOUGLAS WOOLF With daylight (it was exactly a week since he last dressed for the office) he found himself passing ... DOUGLAS WOOLF So he stopped at the first of them, a frigid hothouse whose front tipped forward over the street in ... DOUGLAS WOOLF He found the building in front of which he had stood in the sun all day waiting to be discharged, in... DOUGLAS WOOLF One thing he held against the bird force was the curse of knowing always which direction he was head... DOUGLAS WOOLF They were mostly French, a few Arabs, and despite their uniforms they didn't look very important any... DOUGLAS WOOLF Come on, Princess," he called to the bench, and Carlotta bounced up. She was wide like the rest of t... DOUGLAS WOOLF Beside him Mr. Harris folded his morning newspaper and held it out to Claude. "Seen this ... DOUGLAS WOOLF They looked so familiar that for a moment Claude feared he had doubled back to Mrs. Merritt's city, ... DOUGLAS WOOLF So they drove again, Vivien sitting up and looking now, but as navigator only, letting the desert sc... DOUGLAS WOOLF He died of a breaking heart," Pete said, making a stout log fence of his hands around the glove comp... DOUGLAS WOOLF Whether or not, he felt very much at home in this state. It was to places like this that they had se... DOUGLAS WOOLF Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. VIRGINIA WOOLF Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in c... VIRGINIA WOOLF One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as w... VIRGINIA WOOLF Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends c... VIRGINIA WOOLF I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It exp... VIRGINIA WOOLF Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and t... VIRGINIA WOOLF Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art. VIRGINIA WOOLF Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded. VIRGINIA WOOLF It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. VIRGINIA WOOLF Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is writ... VIRGINIA WOOLF As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. VIRGINIA WOOLF It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or... VIRGINIA WOOLF The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but ... VIRGINIA WOOLF So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by l... VIRGINIA WOOLF For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It h... VIRGINIA WOOLF Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all ... VIRGINIA WOOLF All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point VIRGINIA WOOLF Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of ro... VIRGINIA WOOLF Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written ... VIRGINIA WOOLF I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I... VIRGINIA WOOLF We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. VIRGINIA WOOLF Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! VIRGINIA WOOLF It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entir... VIRGINIA WOOLF The older one grows, the more one likes indecency. VIRGINIA WOOLF Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever t... VIRGINIA WOOLF At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials. VIRGINIA WOOLF These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect t... VIRGINIA WOOLF It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. VIRGINIA WOOLF If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not abo... VIRGINIA WOOLF Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others. VIRGINIA WOOLF My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring... VIRGINIA WOOLF We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by fi... VIRGINIA WOOLF I feel certain that I'm going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times.... VIRGINIA WOOLF As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. VIRGINIA WOOLF What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once. VIRGINIA WOOLF It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and... VIRGINIA WOOLF My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery --always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring... VIRGINIA WOOLF It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if... VIRGINIA WOOLF If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure -- the relationship so secret and private compa... VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of... VIRGINIA WOOLF Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women? VIRGINIA WOOLF All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority an... VIRGINIA WOOLF Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to t... VIRGINIA WOOLF But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in,... VIRGINIA WOOLF It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handlin... VIRGINIA WOOLF Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art. VIRGINIA WOOLF Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distort... VIRGINIA WOOLF Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned... VIRGINIA WOOLF The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the poli... VIRGINIA WOOLF That great Cathedral space which was childhood. VIRGINIA WOOLF The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping. VIRGINIA WOOLF Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of an... VIRGINIA WOOLF Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or VIRGINIA WOOLF When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred. VIRGINIA WOOLF We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even t... VIRGINIA WOOLF Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human... VIRGINIA WOOLF The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to fol... VIRGINIA WOOLF If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about e... VIRGINIA WOOLF A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in t... VIRGINIA WOOLF One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than whe... VIRGINIA WOOLF The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind. VIRGINIA WOOLF Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic. VIRGINIA WOOLF It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with... VIRGINIA WOOLF To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves. VIRGINIA WOOLF Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doin... VIRGINIA WOOLF No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. VIRGINIA WOOLF As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking. VIRGINIA WOOLF When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing. VIRGINIA WOOLF If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. VIRGINIA WOOLF I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It exp... VIRGINIA WOOLF Books are the mirrors of the soul. VIRGINIA WOOLF I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, re... VIRGINIA WOOLF To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father. VIRGINIA WOOLF Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the... VIRGINIA WOOLF Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever ... VIRGINIA WOOLF Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the... VIRGINIA WOOLF Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. VIRGINIA WOOLF The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. VIRGINIA WOOLF Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills ... VIRGINIA WOOLF Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you. VIRGINIA WOOLF One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of... VIRGINIA WOOLF A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her c... VIRGINIA WOOLF The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as s... VIRGINIA WOOLF But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority th... VIRGINIA WOOLF The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only... VIRGINIA WOOLF Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. VIRGINIA WOOLF There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intell... VIRGINIA WOOLF I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and w... VIRGINIA WOOLF I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure. VIRGINIA WOOLF Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before... VIRGINIA WOOLF Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our c... VIRGINIA WOOLF Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. VIRGINIA WOOLF Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be subst... VIRGINIA WOOLF Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... ... VIRGINIA WOOLF When a subject is highly controversial... one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how o... VIRGINIA WOOLF I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locke... VIRGINIA WOOLF Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every ye... VIRGINIA WOOLF Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and s... VIRGINIA WOOLF As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk... VIRGINIA WOOLF Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of cre... VIRGINIA WOOLF Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can on... VIRGINIA WOOLF For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in com... VIRGINIA WOOLF Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped... VIRGINIA WOOLF Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. VIRGINIA WOOLF A strange thing has happened -- while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has be... VIRGINIA WOOLF There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them ... VIRGINIA WOOLF Humor is the first gift to perish in a foreign language. VIRGINIA WOOLF Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still posse... VIRGINIA WOOLF For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private f... VIRGINIA WOOLF What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accid... VIRGINIA WOOLF Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of E... VIRGINIA WOOLF If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, w... VIRGINIA WOOLF What is meant by reality? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be... VIRGINIA WOOLF One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats --and one always secret... VIRGINIA WOOLF Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. VIRGINIA WOOLF 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