Quotes from Virginia Woolf

An immense pressure is on me. I cannot move without dislodging the weight of centuries.

Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotion made the ply of human life.

But beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty - it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life - froze it. One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or shadow, which made the face unrecognisable for a moment and yet added quality one saw for ever after. It was simpler to smooth that all out under the cover of beauty.

If it were now to die, 'twere now to be most happy.

But I was thinking; feeling; living; those two lives that the two halves symbolized with the intensity, the muffled intensity, which a butterfly or moth feels when with its sticky tremulous legs and antennae it pushes out of the chrysalis and emerges and sits quivering beside the broken case for a moment; its wings still creased; its eyes dazzled, incapable of flight.

She did not know. She did not mind...She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything...-and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it.

Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life.

The root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.

The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously.

He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line.

There can be no doubt, I thought, pushing aside the newspaper, that our mean lives, unsightly as they are, put on splendour and have meaning only under the eyes of love

She had done the usual trick - been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere.

I've done my best to see you as you are, without any of this damned romantic nonsense. That was why I asked you here, and it's increased my folly. When you're gone I shall look out of that window and think of you. I shall waste the whole evening thinking of you. I shall waste my whole life, I believe.

I can sit alone by an open window for hours if I like, and hear only bird songs, and the rustle of leaves. The trees are pure gold and orange

It is one of those invaluable seeds, from which, since it is impossible to have every experience fully, one can grow something that represents other people's experiences. Often one has to make do with seeds; the germs of what might have been, had one's life been different.

Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.

And there is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect, thought Clarissa, watching him open the door; for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from one's husband, without losing one's independence, one's self-respect—something, after all, priceless.

The journey is everything. Most necessary of all, but rarest good fortune, we should try to find some man of our own sort who will go with us and to whom we can say the first thing that comes into our heads. For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.

One does not love a place the less because one has suffered in it.

It's something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a spirit; a splash … free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one's kind; something rash, ridiculous… ecstasy — it's ecstasy that matters.

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.

There was a serenity about him always that had the look of innocence, when, technically, the word was no longer applicable.

She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.