Virginia Woolf

The streets of London have their map, but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.

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?

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.

I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

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.

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?

The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.

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

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

When you consider things like the stars our affairs dont seem to matter very much do they

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

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.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.

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

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.

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

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

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

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

The mind is the most capricious of insects flitting fluttering.

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

Habits gradually change the face of one's life as time changes one's physical face; & one does not know it.

One cannot think well love well and sleep well if one has not dined well.

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.

Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.

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

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

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

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.

Life would split apart without letters.

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

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

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.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

Soup is cuisines kindest course.

Fiction is like a spiders web attached ever so slightly perhaps but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

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.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

Growing up is losing some illusions in order to acquire others.

The truer the facts the better the fiction.

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

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.

Without self awareness we are as babies in the cradles.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.

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

Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

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.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality has no such simple effect upon the mind of man.

Theories then are dangerous things.

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

It seemed ... such nonsense inventing differences when people heaven knows were different enough without that.

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.

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

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

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

If you are losing your leisure, look out! — It may be you are losing your soul.

So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.

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

For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?

Only longing can fill with more of itself.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.

Language is wine upon the lips.

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

There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

One cannot think well love well sleep well if one has not dined well.

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.

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.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them we may make them take the mould of arm or breast but they mould our hearts our brains our tongues to their liking.

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

Love, the poet said, is woman’s whole existence.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

The human frame being what it is heart body and brain all mixed together and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well love well sleep well if one has not dined well.

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

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.