Virginia Woolf Quotes
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A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.
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For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.
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Do not move, do not go. Sink within this moment. Hold it for ever.
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People only become writers if they can't find the one book they've always wanted to read.
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We scarcely wish to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.
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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.
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Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above.
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I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual
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His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely knew whether they held dreams or realities...and in five minutes she had filled the shell of the old dream with the flesh of life.
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Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.
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If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.
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and even a tea party means apprehension, breakage
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Intimacy is a difficult art.
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For we think back through our mothers if we are women.
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for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge
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She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.
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I will achieve in my life - Heaven grant that it be not long - some gigantic amalgamation between the two discrepancies so hideously apparent to me. Out of my suffering I will do it. I will knock. I will enter.
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I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.
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Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations.
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All extremes are dangerous.
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It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.
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But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.
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I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.
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A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.