I read the book of Job last night - I don't think God comes out well in it. - Virginia Woolf
To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away... - Virginia Woolf
Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and white? - Virginia Woolf
I burn, I shiver, out of this sun, into this shadow. - Virginia Woolf
Let us not take it for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small. - Virginia Woolf
For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said. - Virginia Woolf
The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. - Virginia Woolf
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others. - Virginia Woolf
I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street. - Virginia Woolf
Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life. - Virginia Woolf
How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it. - 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
You send a girl to school in order to make friends - the right sort. - Virginia Woolf
Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified. - Virginia Woolf
As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall. - Virginia Woolf
Pale, with dark hair, the one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here. - Virginia Woolf
My head is a hive of words that won't settle. - Virginia Woolf
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure - Virginia Woolf
It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on. - Virginia Woolf
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. - Virginia Woolf
A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life. - Virginia Woolf
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. - Virginia Woolf
I’ll be blasted’, he said, ‘if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I’ll write, from this day forward, to please myself - Virginia Woolf
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality - Virginia Woolf
Arrange whatever pieces come your way. - Virginia Woolf
Pretty Stones - Virginia Woolf
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent. - Virginia Woolf
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title. - Virginia Woolf
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. - Virginia Woolf
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. - Virginia Woolf
I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September. - Virginia Woolf
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others. - Virginia Woolf
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size. - 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
The war has put its skeleton fingers even into our pockets. (pg:40) - Virginia Woolf
Lazy and indifferent the heron returns; the sky veils her stars; then bares them - Virginia Woolf
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money. - Virginia Woolf
For we think back through our mothers if we are women. - Virginia Woolf
It was a desire, an echo, a sound; she could drape it in color, see it in form, hear it in music, but not in words; no, never in words. She sighed, teased by desires so incoherent, so incommunicable. - Virginia Woolf
If you drink the good wine of the noble countess, you have to entertain her less desirable friends. - Virginia Woolf
You cannot find peace by avoiding life. - Virginia Woolf
To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone. - Virginia Woolf
The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. - Virginia Woolf
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. - Virginia Woolf
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they? - Virginia Woolf
The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process. - Virginia Woolf
I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. - Virginia Woolf
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue. - Virginia Woolf
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. - Virginia Woolf
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. - Virginia Woolf
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity. - Virginia Woolf
Possible then the professor inited a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of omen, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his superiority. - Virginia Woolf
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman. - Virginia Woolf
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. - Virginia Woolf
You can not gain peace by avoiding life. - Virginia Woolf
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order - Virginia Woolf
I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual - Virginia Woolf
Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women? - Virginia Woolf
For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty. - Virginia Woolf
When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading. - Virginia Woolf
Why should a real chair be better than an imaginary elephant? - Virginia Woolf
As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world. - Virginia Woolf
Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered - Virginia Woolf
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency. - Virginia Woolf
How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger? - Virginia Woolf
No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes - Virginia Woolf
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. - Virginia Woolf