Quotes from Virginia Woolf

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

Why have I so little control? It is the case of much waste and pain in my life.

For we think back through our mothers if we are women.

War is not women's history.

For women live much more in the past...they attach themselves to places.

It is probable that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man.

Thus Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility; and Mr. Hemingway, but much less violently, follows suit.

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

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.

It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?

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

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.

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

But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.

I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun.

[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.

What a labour writing is ... making one sentence do the work of a page; that's what I call hard work.

When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.