Virginia Woolf Quotes (269 Quotes)

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.

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?

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

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

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

The large shiny black forehead of the first whale was no more than two yards from us when it sank beneath the surface of the water, then we saw the huge blue-black bulk glide quietly under the raft right beneath our feet. It lay there for some time, dark and motionless, and we held our breath as we looked down on the gigantic curved back of a mammal a good deal longer than the raft.

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

Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been unborn selves.

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.

I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street.

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Humor is the first gift to perish in a foreign language.

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

For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?

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.

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.