Quotes By Virginia Woolf

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

Language is wine upon the lips.

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.

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

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

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

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.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

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

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

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

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.

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

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.