Top 826 Quotes & Sayings by Virginia Woolf - Page 2

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.

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?

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

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.

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

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

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.

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

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

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.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

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.

Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

I like to have space to spread my mind out in.

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

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

Without self awareness we are as babies in the cradles.

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

Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.

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

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

Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having.

Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotchpotch of impulses, our perpetual miracle - for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death; let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.

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

Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself.

It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities?

Intimacy is a difficult art.

A light here required a shadow there.

I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.

But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful.

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.

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

I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.

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

The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

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

I am rooted, but I flow.

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.

Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.

All extremes of feeling are allied to madness.

Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.

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

In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.

Thinking is my fighting.