Quotes By Virginia Woolf

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.

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.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

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.

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

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

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

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

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.

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.

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.

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.

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.