Quotes By Virginia Woolf

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

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

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.

I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

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?

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

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.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

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

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

Language is wine upon the lips.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

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