Virginia Woolf Quotes

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street.

To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual

I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of treesand changing leaves.

No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. AndI, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, oftennot. Life is a dream surely."

Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above.

I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.

Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

Language is wine upon the lips.

I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.

The first duty of a lecturer: to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks, and keep on the mantelpiece forever.

What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.