Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Intimacy is a difficult art.

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn't pull the trigger?

What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know ... I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.

We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.

Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough.

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.

You cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind.

One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, silence there ... the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art.

Why should a real chair be better than an imaginary elephant?

I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.

But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful.

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.

The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.

To enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot.

Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.