FastSaying

Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.


Virginia Woolf

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give...
HONORE DE BALZAC accepted his idea that the audience for a quality novel might not be large enough to support the aut...
JANE SMILEY Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
EDWARD ALBEE Chess is not for timid souls.
WILHELM STEINITZ Men's natures are alike, it is their habits that carry them far apart.
CONFUCIUS Virginia Woolf was wrong. You do not need a room of your own to write.
JULIA GLASS Those who dare try and failure are courageous souls.
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA Those who dare try are heroic souls.
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.
VIRGINIA WOOLF For the most part, we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs.
ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL In school, I was Martha in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' I loved that.
CARA DELEVINGNE Good habits, which bring our lower passions and appetites under automatic control, leave our natures...
RALPH W. SOCKMAN At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
IAN MCEWAN BRAVE are the courageous souls who dare step outside the predefined yellowbrick road.
KAMI GUILDNER My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
JOYCE CAROL OATES I grew up in a small town, in a small community, and I would not have had access to great plays when...
TRACY LETTS Force works on servile natures, not the free.
BEN JOHNSON An otherwise happily married couple may turn a mixed doubles game into a scene from Who's Afraid of ...
ROD LAVER For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done befo...
VIRGINIA WOOLF However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs...
VIRGINIA WOOLF anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual.
RITA MAE BROWN Terms ill defined, and forms misunderstood, And customs, when their reasons are unknown, Have ...
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER Think of Virginia Woolf, 'A Room of One's Own' - that's what women have always neede...
MARY DALY Good habits, which bring our lower passions and appetites under automatic control, leave our natures...
RALPH W. SOCKMAN It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symp...
STEPHEN FRY There is something so hopeful about a diary, a journal, a new notebook, which Joan Didion and Virgin...
LILY KOPPEL I like reading... French, Russian classics - Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemi...
ANDREA BOCELLI To pursue the thing she needed to do, Virginia Woolf wrote, “a woman must have money and a room of...
ELISABETH EAVES Polaris provides a high-profile address and access to thousands of people who live, work and play in...
FRANZ GEIGER Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexu...
RITA MAE BROWN The great souls are not merely those who initiate and keep doing beautiful things in life to enlarge...
ANUJ SOMANY When you think about Broadway, you think broad and big, but the fact is there are so many plays that...
STEVE KAZEE When I saw Virginia Woolf, somewhere between the first and second acts, someone I had known as my mo...
KIEFER SUTHERLAND I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for ...
MICHEL FABER I do not go so far as the extreme male 'sexists' who contend that women should confine thems...
MURRAY ROTHBARD It was this that made him attractive to women, who liked the sense that he was not altogether manly....
VIRGINIA WOOLF It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG (All the grief she had suffered over her lifetime had moulded her face into a mask of eternal sadnes...
JEAN SASSON Yet, I didn't understand that she was intentionally disguising her feelings with sarcasm; that was u...
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY Amongst the sons of men how few are known Who dare be just to merit not their own.
CHARLES CHURCHILL I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is...
LALLA WARD Happy are all free peoples, too strong to be dispossessed. But blessed are those among nations who d...
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING Californians devised a system of electricity sales that ignored every dimension of the free market.
P. J. O'ROURKE For if one should propose to all men a choice, bidding them select the best customs from all the cus...
HERODOTUS The difference between an amateur and a professional is in their habits. An amateur has amateur habi...
STEVEN PRESSFIELD Vita Sackville-West is one of my favorite female icons. She was a writer and a prolific gardener, bu...
GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ...
KELLY JONES All frauds, like the wall daubed with untempered mortar ... always tend to the decay of what they ar...
RICHARD WHATELY Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to u...
LEO TOLSTOY Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to u...
LEO NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY All are free to believe or not believe; all are free to practice a faith or not. But those who belie...
JEFF MILLER I don't believe we own our children, they're their own souls who make their own choices, we ...
ELLE MACPHERSON There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say.
CYRIL CONNOLLY There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.
CYRIL CONNOLLY These are not good times for political cartoonists. And I think this controversy makes it worse, bec...
DARYL CAGLE The credit belongs to those who are actually in the arena, who strive valiantly; who know the great ...
THEODORE ROOSEVELT There are many who are living far below their possibilities because they are continually handing ove...
RALPH WALDO TRINE There are many who are living far below their possibilities because they are continually handing ove...
RALPH WALDO TRINE And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly...
VIRGINIA WOOLF If you are losing your leisure, look out! -- It may be you are losing your soul.
VIRGINIA WOOLF From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work, and a sudden train passed betwe...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV She was so far absorbed in this work, for it was really difficult to find how all these sounds shoul...
NICOLE ARLYN Fain would I but dare not; I dare, and yet I may not; I may, although I care not for pleasure when...
SIR WALTER RALEIGH The United States must not allow North Korea to exacerbate tensions between our key strategic allies...
EVAN BAYH There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, w...
SIR THOMAS BROWNE There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, whe...
THOMAS BROWNE SR. There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, whe...
THOMAS BROWNE For the exploitation of human greed, they have devised comparison and competition. Right from childh...
LOBSANG TENZIN Souls are flowers, only God has the right to pluck them. But those who commit suicide: their souls a...
MUNIA KHAN I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily l...
KAREN THOMPSON WALKER We who have been born and nurtured on this soil, we, whose habits, manners, and customs are the same...
RICHARD V. ALLEN [W]e who have been born and nurtured on this soil, we, whose habits, manners, and customs are the sa...
RICHARD ALLEN We who have been born and nurtured on this soil, we, whose habits, manners, and customs are the same...
RICHARD ALLEN Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slav...
GEORGE GORDON BYRON Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slav...
LORD BYRON One essential of a free government is that it rest wholly on voluntary support. And one certain proo...
LYSANDER SPOONER We believe it may be because parents who perceive their neighborhoods as unsafe do not allow their c...
DR. JULIE LUMENG I'd studied English literature at university, but I was also far more enamored with Virginia Woo...
FELICITY JONES When you look at their health habits, they had plenty of sleep and they had just as much free time a...
DR. ZORBA PASTER They are not free who drag their chains after them
FRENCH PROVERB What will make you a star is in you
SOTONYE ANGA It's a ridiculous book, filled with wicked fantasies and silly notions and improbable romance. But y...
TESSA DARE For as good habits of the people require good laws to support them, so laws, to be observed, need go...
NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI It is those who have this imperative demand for the best in their natures, and who will accept nothi...
ORISON SWETT MARDEN As fast as laws are devised, their evasion is contrived.
GERMAN PROVERB The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learne...
LAUREN GROFF Christianity is not the faith of the complacent, the comfortable or of the timid. It demands and cre...
MITT ROMNEY Support the strong, give courage to the timid, remind the indifferent, and warn the opposed.
WHITNEY M. YOUNG, JR. Support the strong, give courage to the timid, remind the indifferent, and warn the opposed.
WHITNEY M. YOUNG JR. Support the strong, give courage to the timid, remind the indifferent, and warn the opposed.
WHITNEY M. YOUNG The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and...
ROBERT FRANCIS KENNEDY Let those who desire a secure homeland conquer it. Let those who do not conquer it live under the wh...
JOSE MARTI In a health relationship, it should always be about them. Two people are involved. And both of them ...
LISA S. LEWIS By nature, human beings are habit-forming creatures. We cannot live without being controlled by our ...
TERENCE T. GORSKI They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak; . . . . They are slaves w...
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL Terror and pleasure are linked in us. We are a baldly miswired species, Martie. Terror delights us, ...
DEAN KOONTZ Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.
VIRGINIA WOOLF Virgina Woolf versus Edward Lear."

"Christ Alive," said Billy. "Are those my only choices...
CHINA MIéVILLE For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their be...
THOMAS JEFFERSON

More Virginia 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 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 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 I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.
VIRGINIA WOOLF I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.
VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of...
VIRGINIA WOOLF The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
VIRGINIA WOOLF If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly an...
VIRGINIA WOOLF Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.
VIRGINIA WOOLF I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality o...
VIRGINIA WOOLF The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
VIRGINIA WOOLF I am rooted, but I flow.
VIRGINIA WOOLF When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
VIRGINIA WOOLF Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
VIRGINIA WOOLF The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge...
VIRGINIA WOOLF One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always se...
VIRGINIA WOOLF I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.
VIRGINIA WOOLF The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy...
VIRGINIA WOOLF With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets—what nonsense was he ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck betwee...
VIRGINIA WOOLF Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.
VIRGINIA WOOLF One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtl...
VIRGINIA WOOLF What I value is the naked contact of a mind.
VIRGINIA WOOLF Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic ac...
VIRGINIA WOOLF All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense ...
VIRGINIA WOOLF To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last,...
VIRGINIA WOOLF