Virginia Woolf Quotes

And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known byher shoes and her gloves.

No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.

so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again...

[Shakespeare} the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping

Roses, " she thought sardonically, "All trash, m’dear.

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

Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing.

The great cathedral space which was childhood.

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

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

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

Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known euphemistically as the stately homes of England.

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

Life is a luminous halo a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning.

A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.

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

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 for ever.

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

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

He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.

As for my next book I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear pendant gravid asking to be cut or it will fall.

All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

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

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

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