Quotes By Virginia Woolf

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

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

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

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

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Language is wine upon the lips.

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

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

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.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

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

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.

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.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

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

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.