Virginia Woolf Quotes
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.
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process.
As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely.
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.
A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.
If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.
I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.
No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.
It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!
Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face - as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought.
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself.
Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.
Like all very handsome men who die tragically, he left not so much a character behind him as a legend. Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face.
Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.
I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.
This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.