Quotes from Virginia Woolf

But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.

Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.

It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.

It is as if Emily Brontë could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognizable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality.

Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences.

When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?

... it's been a perpetual discovery, my life. A miracle.

Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.

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.

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

Life would split apart without letters.

Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end.

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

How remorseless life is!

Of the rest some we know to be dead though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six.

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.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.