Virginia Woolf Quotes

653 quotes in 6815 categories

• To enjoy freedom ... we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in…
• 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…
• Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
• Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face - as if hung on a scaffold of heavy…
• I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms.
• Does housekeeping interest you at all? I think it really ought to be just as good as writing and I never see where the separation…
• If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of utmost importance; very various; heroic and…
• King old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always to to a good man, they say.
• It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
• To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action.
• Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. More than anything... it calls for confidence in oneself...And how can we generate this imponderable…
• The history of most women is hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence.
• You can't think how I depend on you, and when you're not there the colour goes out of my life.
• I have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on longer in these terrible times. I shan't recover this time. I hear voices…
• In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
• Without self awareness we are as babies in the cradles.
• It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time,…
• Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations ...
• If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.
• When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very…

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