Listen. There is a sound like the knocking of railway trucks in a siding. That is the happy concatenation of one event following another in our lives. Knock, knock, knock. Must, must, must. Must go, must sleep, must wake, must get up — sober, merciful word which we pretend to revile, which we press tight to our hearts, without which we should be undone. How we worship that sound like the knocking together of trucks in a siding!
Virginia Woolf
Related What we found was that maturational timing -- onset of first period -- was not an important factor f... AVIVA MUST We know that children who are overweight have advanced bone development -- they grow faster in all w... AVIVA MUST For the parents of a girl who is not overweight and who gets her first period early, it doesn't mean... AVIVA MUST Given the epidemic of obesity in the population, it's important to know where best to intervene. AVIVA MUST Living in thanksgiving daily is a habit; we must open our hearts to love more, we must open our arms... FARSHAD ASL Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and u... PABLO PICASSO Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and u... STEPHEN A. BRENNAN Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and... STEPHEN A. BRENNAN It must be admitted that there are some parts of the soul which we must entirely paralyze before we ... CHAMFORT We must tell it to the world that the higher education is necessary to the best agriculture. We must... LIBERTY HYDE BAILEY Education is the process in which we discover that learning adds quality to our lives. Learning must... WILLIAM GLASSER Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual. RITA MAE BROWN Costs have shot higher in the trucks unit in a manner which they must explain. CARL HOLMQUIST Our firm conviction that ours is a just cause and that we must find a peaceful way to attain our goa... LECH WALESA We must say in own handwriting from or own minds and hearts that this war is not a war we should be ... LOTTIE GIBSON Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexu... RITA MAE BROWN In a democratic society we must live cooperatively, and serve the community in which we live, to the... ELEANOR ROOSEVELT It must be admitted that there are some parts of the soul which we must entirely paralyse before we ... NICOLAS CHAMFORT To find ourselves, we must find that which is not of our self CHRIS L. ANDREADIS We had opportunities to put the ball game away, but did not knock down our bunnies. We must also get... DEREK SONDERLAND In order for us to practice self-control, we must have a goal. We must have something we are saying ... DANNY SILK There are roads which must not be followed, armies which must not be attacked, towns which must not ... SUN TZU We must alter our lives in order to alter our hearts, for it is impossible to live one way and pray ... WILLIAM LAW It is not enough just to be good. We must be good for something. We must contribute good to the worl... GORDON B. HINCKLEY In order to appreciate a great man, we must know his surroundings. We must understand the scope of t... ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL Spirituality is not some external goal that one must seek, but a part of the divine core of each of ... B.K.S. IYENGAR These next three weeks are going to tell the tale of this team. It's imperative that we go down ther... JEREMIAH TROTTER Death, like so much in life, is a lesson, which must be understood and cherished, not feared; it is ... IMANIA MARGRIA This was their way of honoring the dead. The story over, the demands of their own hard, rough lives ... RICHARD ADAMS We must rebuild this country together for the good of our nation. We should not be divided into grou... CHENJERAI HUNZVI In order to deserve, we must pay our dues and steadily work for perfection. We must relish in strugg... BRYANT H. MCGILL To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we mus... CONFUCIUS To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order;
to put the nation in order, we mu... BIBLE Our rational minds often attempt to minimise or negate the mystical encounters. We forget the power ... BRIAN WEISS There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we must obey. RALPH WALDO EMERSON We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during wh... T.S. ELIOT Many people believe they have found the key to Heaven's gate, not realizing that there is no key hol... RICHELLE E. GOODRICH A life without problems is a life less likely to be. VANCE B.. CHAN That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN Who will make a doore of gold must knock a naile every day. GEORGE HERBERT Whoever is spared personal pain must feel himself called to help in diminishing the pain of others. ... ALBERT SCHWEITZER To be interested in the public good we must be disinterested, that is, not interested in goods in wh... GEORGE HERBERT MEAD Life is a dream from which we all must wake before we can dream again. ROBERT JORDAN To get things done, we must work together. We must meet in the middle to work out our differences an... CHRISTINE GREGOIRE We must be willing to go in life as planned,so that we have a life for which dreamt. DR ANIL KUMAR SINHA In the fight against bigotry, we stand together and we must. In the fight against injustice, we stan... CYNTHIA MCKINNEY All those trucks and barges that carry our goods to port are vital connections to the only force whi... JO ANN EMERSON There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn o... SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up arou... MARGARET SANGER The manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing that must be e... DEAN ACHESON The manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing that must be e... DEAN GOODERHAM ACHESON We cannot play ostrich. Democracy just cannot flourish amid fear. Liberty cannot bloom amid hate. Ju... THURGOOD MARSHALL Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; Therefore, we must be saved by hope.... REINHOLD NIEBUHR Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ is the foundation upon which sincere and meaningful repentance must b... EZRA TAFT BENSON The horrific cases in Ferguson, in Staten Island with the death of Eric Garner, and all across the c... AL SHARPTON The college system and the way it's reflected in the SA, [which is] set up to support those colleges... EVAN ROSS To become more like Jesus we must understand that the only growth we can be in charge of is our own. MARY E. DEMUTH We must look for ways to be an active force in our own lives. We must take charge of our own destini... LES BROWN We must believe in the power of education. We must respect just laws. We must love ourselves, our ol... ARTHUR ASHE There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers; we must conceive and apprehend a thou... WILLIAM GODWIN Governments must commit to sound economic and financial policies. This is how we ensure reform in th... MARIO DRAGHI We must improvise, and we must experiment, and we must do things that might go wrong, and everything... FLEA If the universe is running down like a clock, the clock must have been wound up at a date which we c... DEAN INGE Fake it may be, lies and deceptions, but this is the world in which we find ourselves, and here we m... IAN MCDONALD We must accept life for what it actually is -- a challenge to our quality without which we should ne... IDA R. WYLIE We must accept life for what it actually is - a challenge to our quality without which we should nev... ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON We must love someone. We must keep loving, all our days, Someone, anyone, anywhere Outside our selve... RUSKIN BOND More than ever, we as parents and a nation must do something about the growth of obesity in our chil... LEE HANEY We must select the Illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion, if we want... CYRIL CONNOLLY We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion, if we want... CYRIL CONNOLLY We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we wan... CYRIL CONNOLLY In a negotiation, we must find a solution that pleases everyone, because no one accepts that they MU... NABIL N. JAMAL We must infuse our lives with art. Our national leaders must be informed that we want them to use ou... MAYA ANGELOU To gain strength in our struggles, we must have a positive perspective of the principles in the plan... L. LIONEL KENDRICK Even if all life on our planet is destroyed, there must be other life somewhere which we know nothin... PHILIP K. DICK Those of us in law enforcement must redouble our efforts to resist bias and prejudice. We must bette... JAMES COMEY …we must be careful not to do our enemies’ work for them. To argue that to preserve our freedoms... LILLIAN WHITE To be creative, first we must be generous. Then we must have a quiet, indomitable belief in our own ... DONNA GODDARD Often and often must he have thought, that, to be or not to be forever, was a question, which must b... JONES VERY We are in a struggle against the forces of radical Islam and terror, which must be defeated for our ... MIKE MCCAUL We must know the whole play in order to properly act our parts; the conception of totality must neve... KAKUZō OKAKURA We must build a new world, a far better world -- one in which the eternal dignity of man is respecte... HARRY S TRUMAN We must be silent before we can listen. We must listen before we can learn. We must learn be... WILLIAM ARTHUR WARD We must have the courage to allow a little disorder in our lives. BEN WEININGER We didn't know which way it would go, so it was a happy surprise. This is just a wonderful acknowled... CORINNE MARRINAN To be right, a person must do one of two things: either he must learn to have God in his work and ho... MEISTER ECKHART Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Not... PHILIP YANCEY We must be silent before we can listen.We must listen before we can learn.We must learn before we ca... WILLIAM ARTHUR WARD In order to discern truth in our hearts, we must unpack the lies". EVINDA LEPINS In a condition of struggle and of failure we must be able to say "I must try harder" or "I must try ... ALLEN WHEELIS I think that many people will intentionally overlook all of the lifeless facts about their relations... C. JOYBELL C. Even though some in our government may claim that civil liberties must be compromised in order to pr... LUCILLE ROYBAL-ALLARD There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the le... CLIVE BELL Our workers comp debt is the Achilles heel of our state's economy, and I firmly believe that in orde... JOE MANCHIN III Lent stimulates us to let the Word of God penetrate our life and in this way to know the fundamental... BENEDICT XVI One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means ... MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. To live we must conquer incessantly, we must have the courage to be happy. HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL To live we must conquer incessantly, we must have the courage to be happy. HENRI FREDERIC AMIEL To live we must conquer incessantly, we must have the courage to be happy. HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL We must say "no" to what, in our heart, we don't want. We must say "no" to doing things out of oblig... SUZETTE R. HINTON
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