Thoughts are divine.


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

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
EDWARD ALBEE
My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
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 was wrong. You do not need a room of your own to write.
JULIA GLASS
At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
IAN MCEWAN
I like reading... French, Russian classics - Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemi...
ANDREA BOCELLI
Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual.
RITA MAE BROWN
In school, I was Martha in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' I loved that.
CARA DELEVINGNE
It was this that made him attractive to women, who liked the sense that he was not altogether manly....
VIRGINIA WOOLF
I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexu...
RITA MAE BROWN
An otherwise happily married couple may turn a mixed doubles game into a scene from Who's Afraid of ...
ROD LAVER
Ideas are infinite, original, and lively divine thoughts.
KARL WILHELM FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL
When I saw Virginia Woolf, somewhere between the first and second acts, someone I had known as my mo...
KIEFER SUTHERLAND
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
Think of Virginia Woolf, 'A Room of One's Own' - that's what women have always neede...
MARY DALY
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
There is something so hopeful about a diary, a journal, a new notebook, which Joan Didion and Virgin...
LILY KOPPEL
I'd studied English literature at university, but I was also far more enamored with Virginia Woo...
FELICITY JONES
The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learne...
LAUREN GROFF
To pursue the thing she needed to do, Virginia Woolf wrote, “a woman must have money and a room of...
ELISABETH EAVES
How many people have I heard claim their children as the greatest accomplishment and comfort of thei...
ELIZABETH GILBERT
I was influenced by big, strong voices - writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles; ...
STACEY D'ERASMO
I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily l...
KAREN THOMPSON WALKER
I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for ...
MICHEL FABER
I love reading other people's diaries, especially someone like Virginia Woolf's - such a for...
MICHAEL PALIN
When you think about Broadway, you think broad and big, but the fact is there are so many plays that...
STEVE KAZEE
Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I re...
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This wa...
ANNE LAMOTT
Happy is he who has gained the wealth of divine thoughts, wretched is he whose beliefs about the god...
EMPEDOCLES
No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway&#...
J. G. BALLARD
I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is...
LALLA WARD
It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or...
GARTH RISK HALLBERG
She was so far absorbed in this work, for it was really difficult to find how all these sounds shoul...
NICOLE ARLYN
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

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