So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy.
Virginia Woolf
Related I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ... KELLY JONES you left and i wanted you still yet i deserved someone who was willing to stay RUPI KAUR Her silent singing wrapped around the story she was telling herself, which she extended further ever... ALICE MUNRO She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a ... LILY KING In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction tha... TONI MORRISON There was another problem with Emma's father, difficult for a small child who already thought of her... CAROL LEE It is God who lets the wild apples grow, to satisfy the hungry. He showed her a wild apple-tree, wit... HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN She closed her eyes and jumped. For a moment she felt herself hang suspended, free of everything. Th... CASSANDRA CLARE ...she lost twenty minutes sitting on the floor with her arms wrapped around her knees, smiling into... NORA ROBERTS The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative... BETTY FRIEDAN A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of he... JOHN BERGER And as she looked at the pool she saw the waters gather up into a column, rushing up foaming and sta... ELLIOT MABEUSE If [Patricia Highsmith] saw an acquaintance walking down the sidewalk she would deliberately cross o... ANDREW WILSON A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between her work and her play; her labor an... FRANçOIS-RENé DE CHATEAUBRIAND With Peter, she was laid bare; he extracted her from herself. SARAH BLAKLEY-CARTWRIGHT Her father would return from China. He’d come back with all his soldiers. He’d pick her up in hi... PAOLO BACIGALUPI She had been defeated by herself alone, and the sadness of it left a dark shadow in her heart. It fu... YO YO Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed... ANNE RICE She felt like weeping. She didn't know why at first, but then it hit her. He knew her. DENNIS LEHANE On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not t... SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR I've been talking to myself a lot lately. I don't know what that's about, but my mother was the same... DAN CHAON Celaena walked and walked, until she found herself by the tree-lined shore of a lake, glaringly brig... SARAH J. MAAS Rosy lifted her arm, tried to say something, then pointed at the cafe, held her head, covered her mo... R.G. MANSE He was ruining it. Five minutes before, he’d looked at her with desire and she’d thought finally... ARIELLE HUDSON The latter part of her stay in Voronezh had been the happiest period in Princess Marya's life. Her l... LEO TOLSTOY I hope you find your truth and when you do, you stand in the middle of it strong, beautiful and nimb... SASHA GRAHAM exhilaration fizzed through Clarke’s body. Before she realised what she was doing, she had thrown ... KASS MORGAN It was a burden on all her muscles. A hollow deeper than her bones. She braced herself though, she k... HUBERT MARTIN Her entire life was obeying orders. She’d left her Father behind, only to fall into the hands of a... CALLIE HUNTER His body was urgent against her, and she didn't have the heart anymore to fight...She saw his eyes, ... D.H. LAWRENCE She tried to tear herself away from him. The effort broke against his arms that had not felt it. Her... AYN RAND Karou wished she could be the kind of girl who was complete unto herself, comfortable in solitude, s... LAINI TAYLOR This did not in any way alter her intention of accomplishing her mission; on the contrary; it seemed... JANE BOWLES You're still lovely," Mor said a bit gently. Elain offered a half smile. "I suppose that war m... SARAH J. MAAS Occupied in observing Mr. Bingley’s attentions to her sister, Elizabeth was far from suspecting th... JANE AUSTEN Her room was warm and lightsome. A huge doll sat with her legs apart in the copious easy-chair besid... JAMES JOYCE She is learning to use her left hand and relearning to use her right hand. Her personality is the sa... MAGGIE MERMIN But the lies which Odette ordinarily told were less innocent, and served to prevent discoveries whic... MARCEL PROUST She lived by herself and all she had was her Social Security. She made all the beads herself. DEBBIE DOOL This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the ... CARSON MCCULLERS He dropped his head and kissed her. He kissed her and it was a kiss of utter certainty, the kind of ... JOJO MOYES He had had to be father and mother to her, and he had taken to his tasks with determination, seeking... PAULA BRACKSTON He felt, rather than saw, her chin lift toward him. But instead of pulling her hand from his grip an... V.S. CARNES wandering in the summer in the woods of Neldoreth [Beren] came upon Lúthien, daughter of Thingol an... J.R.R. TOLKIEN His agony somehow became an invisible hand, stretching out through the Force, a hand that found her,... MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER …he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a... TIM O'BRIEN Yes; he had done it. She was in the carriage, and felt that he had placed her there, that his will a... JANE AUSTEN Sissy had two great failings. She was a great lover and a great mother. She had so much of tendernes... BETTY SMITH I suppose it was the end of the world for her when her husband and her baby were killed. I suppose s... W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM When she fucked up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified. into paralysis, she collapsed... JOHN GREEN And he had just sent her into the arms of her strongest potential allies: to the homeland of her mot... SARAH J. MAAS We gave the woman for her trouble a generous fee, with which she was highly pleased, and proceeded t... HELEN JOSEPHINE SANBORN When my father died, my mother came back from being Mrs. Birkin to being Judy Campbell. She was a st... JANE BIRKIN She shrunk into herself and waited for me to stare at her like she was gross an dirty. But I just wa... KRISTA RITCHIE Once a woman is comfortable in her own skin, living her own life and building a foundation by hersel... NIKKI ROWE There was a peculiar fascination for Dorothea in this division of property intended for herself, and... GEORGE ELIOT He firmly pulled her body against his and he brushed her lips with his. Staring into her eyes, he li... LANEY SMITH She had never been in love before. She'd tried to save herself the pain, but all her pretending and ... MELANIE DICKERSON She was as one who, in madness, was resolute to throw herself from a precipice, but to whom some rem... ANTHONY TROLLOPE
"Take your hair down," he croaked, his voice deep even to his own ears.
She ... KRISTEN CASEY She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she'd forgotten. She knew hersel... ANN BRASHARES ...It often seemed to her that she thought too much about herself, you could have made her blush any... HENRY JAMES She called herself an angel, and wandered the world from girlhood till death. She lived every kind o... ROMAN PAYNE Brigan was saying her name, and he was sending her a feeling. It was courage and strength, and somet... KRISTIN CASHORE After my mom died, there was so much written about her fashion and her style and all that, and I fel... CAROLINE KENNEDY Toxic' was actually an accurate description of the feelings Clementine had so often felt in Erika's ... LIANE MORIARTY She wants to prove to herself, her dad and Patrick that she is going to take her life in her hands a... JASON THOMPSON He, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, ... ANAïS NIN She was nothing but a woman who put other people in front of herself. She cared so much about her ki... NICOLE BROWN The intensity of intention inside a woman’s mind to reign like a queen is so pronounced that she e... ANUJ SOMANY Intuitively, she sensed Leonardo’s gaze on her, and she caught sight of him near the entrance to t... DELANEY DIAMOND At some point, she didn't know when or for how long, she found herself lost, lost in a song. Her eye... JAMES MORRIS The issue isn't whether he loved you, it's how much. Too much. Love can be poison SARAH J. MAAS I am broken and healing, but every piece of my heart belong to you. SARAH J. MAAS He thinks he'll be remembered as the villain in the story. But I forgot to tell him that the villain... SARAH J. MAAS Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold ... GEORGE R.R. MARTIN Hodor," said Hodor. GEORGE R.R. MARTIN You do what you love, what you need SARAH J. MAAS I turned. Rhysand leaned against the archway into the sitting room, arms crossed, wings nowhere... SARAH J. MAAS He was shockingly easy to follow. The pressure of his hand, the step of his foot, the angle of his f... HEATHER DIXON Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you... C. JOYBELL C. O, the mulberry-tree is of trees the queen!
Bare long after the rest are green;
But as the tim... DINAH MARIA MULOCK (USED PSEUDONYM MRS. CRAIK) She was scarcely a year older than I was, dark-haired, slender, with a face that would break your he... GEORGE R.R. MARTIN I want to make you weep. I want all your pleasure, Iris, all your pain, everything you are. Come for... ELIZABETH HOYT For a woman to deny the necessity of true love in her life would be to deny herself, and her creator... DWAIN K. WHITE SR. She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, ... MICHAEL ONDAATJE His hands tightened on her shoulders as the truth washed over him. My God, she really had told him y... CAROLYN JEWEL And when the ass saw the angel of the LORD, she thrust herself unto the wall, and crushed Balaam's f... BIBLE I have so much admiration for people who devote their life to the church, ... I was quite inspired b... CHLOE SEVIGNY A Western woman is not her brother's or her father's property. She's just herself. She c... AYAAN HIRSI ALI She was so far absorbed in this work, for it was really difficult to find how all these sounds shoul... NICOLE ARLYN He called to her primal side; the ancient aspect of her animal self that wanted to submit. It wanted... DIANNA HARDY There had been no enemies, just one single adversary, herself; her future had been killed by her own... GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA She felt a cage coming down around her; too late she realized that he had her trapped by the heart. ... JODI PICOULT He remembered the time he had hooked one of a pair of marlin. The male fish always let the female fi... ERNEST HEMINGWAY In time, she eased into sleep, and her head rested against the plane of his shoulder. He held her an... DORIEN KELLY Her fingertips dug into his shoulders as she pressed closer. Then her lips parted to his, and there ... SIERRA DONOVAN Of all the stages in a woman's life, none is so dangerous as the period between her acknowledgement ... HUGH KELLY Knees suddenly weak, she reached for his forearms to stabilize herself. “You came for me.” ... MARISSA MEYER I needed to protect her from this - and from herself. RICHELLE MEAD
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