Virginia Woolf Quotes
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.
Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.
A light here required a shadow there.
I am rooted, but I flow.
All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.
The artist after all is a solitary being.
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.
It is no use trying to sum people up.
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
Books are the mirrors of the soul.
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
What does the brain matter compared with the heart?
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.
Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.
The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.
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.
