Virginia Woolf Quotes

Marvelous are the innocent.

No, I'm not clever. I've always cared more for people than for ideas.

Life would split apart without letters.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.

They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort.

It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.

Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.

One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.

The mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

Without self awareness we are as babies in the cradles.

By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

Martha: Oh, I like your anger. I think that's what I like about you most. Your anger.

The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.

Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?

Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.

Of the rest some we know to be dead though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six.

Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

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.

How remorseless life is!

And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.

Words belong to each other.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

Why have I so little control? It is the case of much waste and pain in my life.

The proper stuff of fiction' does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.

Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.

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

If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women.

I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.

There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.

Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence

I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.

it is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams

I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.

The profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait - whether to fish with worms or not.

All the months are crude experiments, out of which the perfect September is made.

He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.

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

Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.

The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.

Fear no more, says the heart.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

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