Virginia Woolf Quotes

That complete statement which is literature.

In marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house.

Facts must be manipulated; some must be brightened; others shaded; yet, in the process, they must never lose their integrity.

Death is woven in with the violets,” said Louis. “Death and again death.”)

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...

This idea struck me: the army is the body : I am the brain. Thinking is my fighting. (15 May 1940)

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

Do you know I get such a passion for reading sometimes its like the other passion -writing- only the wrong side of the carpet.

I use my friends rather as giglamps : There's another field I see: by your light. Over there's a hill. I widen my landscape.

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

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

in this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow... (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house & grounds)

Septimus has been working too hard" - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.

For while directly we say that it [the length of human life] is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.

Death is woven in with the violets, ” said Louis. “Death and again death.”)

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.]

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

All the time she writing the world had continued.

He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?

Even the names of the books gave me food for thought.

You send a girl to school in order to make friends - the right sort.

Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their stories.

You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one.

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

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women

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

In the flailing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances

Why should a real chair be better than an imaginary elephant?

Freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art.

We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.

But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.

For ourselves, who are ordinary men and women, let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every one of the senses she has given us.

I am extremely happy walking on the downs...I like to have space to spread my mind out in.

They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did.

The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.’ That will be useful.

I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality

I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction.

...to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.

It is much more important to be oneself than anything else.

Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority.

Possible then the professor inited a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of omen, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his superiority.

Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified.

How then did it work out, this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?

If you drink the good wine of the noble countess, you have to entertain her less desirable friends.