-
The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.
Virginia Woolf -
I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.
Virginia Woolf
-
For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.
Virginia Woolf -
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.
Virginia Woolf -
A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.
Virginia Woolf -
What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.
Virginia Woolf -
Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.
Virginia Woolf -
I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.
Virginia Woolf
-
Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.
Virginia Woolf -
The history of most women is hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence.
Virginia Woolf -
By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream
Virginia Woolf -
In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality.
Virginia Woolf -
Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?
Virginia Woolf -
Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.
Virginia Woolf
-
The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.
Virginia Woolf -
Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?
Virginia Woolf -
But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.
Virginia Woolf -
Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath.
Virginia Woolf -
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
Virginia Woolf -
When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre
Virginia Woolf
-
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
Virginia Woolf -
The root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.
Virginia Woolf -
Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read; what I haven't read.
Virginia Woolf -
Consolation for those moments when you can't tell whether you're the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.
Virginia Woolf