Virginia Woolf Quotes

She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

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

Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.

The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

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

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

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.

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?

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

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

Language is wine upon the lips.

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.

I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.

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

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices

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

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

For nothing was simply one thing.

The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

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.

I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin.

The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

I'm terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.

I am rooted, but I flow.

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?

I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd.

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

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

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.

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.

Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you

But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.

Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.

He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.

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

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

If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their sense. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. Humanity goes. Money making becomes so important that they must work by night as well as by day. Health goes. And so competitive do they become that they will not share their work with others though they have more themselves. What then remains of a human being who has lost sight, sound, and sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave.

No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.

I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.