Virginia Woolf Quotes

"If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged"

"If we didn't live adventurously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged."

"Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are."

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."

"At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials."

"On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points."

"If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think"

"For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together"

"Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the"

"Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that"

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

"Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end."

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

"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."

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

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency."

"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."

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

"Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends."

"Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art."