Quotes By Virginia Woolf

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.

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

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.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.

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

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.

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

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 older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

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.

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

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.