Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known euphemistically as the stately homes of England.

fishing teaches a stern morality; inculcates a remorseless honesty.

... pure honesty is a doubtful quality; it means often lack of imagination.

What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.

Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Jealousy ... survives every other passion of mankind.

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.

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.

I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.

Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One's Mind about Another Person.

more and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will.

loveliness is infernally sad.

He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.

I am rooted, but I flow.

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

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.

Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely.

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

Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.

Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself.