Every phrase and gesture was studied. Now and again when she said something a little out of the ordinary she wrote it down herself in a notebook. It was like watching someone organizing her own immortality. Harold Laski (1893-1950) – On sitting next to Virginia Woolf at lunch. In a letter of George Lyttelton, 27 October 1955
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
Virginia Woolf
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.
Virginia Woolf
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Virginia Woolf
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
Virginia Woolf
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
Virginia Woolf
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.
Virginia Woolf
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
Virginia Woolf
As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
Virginia Woolf
Language is wine upon the lips.
Virginia Woolf
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the
soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
Virginia Woolf
Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
Virginia Woolf
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
Virginia Woolf
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
Virginia Woolf
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
Virginia Woolf
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
Virginia Woolf
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
Virginia Woolf
These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
Virginia Woolf
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
Virginia Woolf
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural
size.
Virginia Woolf
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.
Virginia Woolf
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of
truth.
Virginia Woolf
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
Virginia Woolf
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?
Virginia Woolf
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
Virginia Woolf
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.
Virginia Woolf
Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.
Virginia Woolf
This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is
always saying the very opposite to what other people say.
Virginia Woolf
If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why
not write about it truthfully?
Virginia Woolf
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.
Virginia Woolf
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
Virginia Woolf
I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.
Virginia Woolf
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its
own.
Virginia Woolf
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Virginia Woolf
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
Virginia Woolf
Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have
room to breathe.
Virginia Woolf
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
Virginia Woolf
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.
Virginia Woolf
The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Virginia Woolf
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
Virginia Woolf
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
Virginia Woolf
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
Virginia Woolf
