Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. (...) Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own

There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.

Does Nature supplement what man advanced? Or does she complete what he began?

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.

and even a tea party means apprehension, breakage

Despairing of human relationships (people were so difficult), she often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her.

Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.

I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me , here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends.

I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases.

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis waking that kills us.

His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at their feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.

What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself- a voice answering a voice.

The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls unrecorded.

His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely knew whether they held dreams or realities...and in five minutes she had filled the shell of the old dream with the flesh of life...

The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?

And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.

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.

What did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer.

All the time she writing the world had continued.

I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.

How fast the stream flows from January to December!

Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.

What I value is the naked contact of a mind.