Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Big Ben was beginning to strike, first the warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.

Orlando curtseyed; she complied; she flattered the good man's humours as she would not have done had his neat breeches been a woman's skirts, and his braided coat a woman's satin bodice. Thus, 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 was off like a bird, bullet, or arrow, impelled by what desire, shot by whom, at what directed, who could say?

I like observing people. I like looking at things.

These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.

I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.

She felt as if things were moving past her as she lay stretched on the bed under the single sheet. But it's not landscape any longer, she thought; it's people's lives, their changing lives.

They had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth.

I is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.

Naturally men are drowned in a storm, but it is a perfectly straightforward affair, and the depths of the sea are only water after all.

Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.

I had tea. I then spent a long time in a bookshop. A quiet evening.

I dance. I ripple. I am thrown over you like a net of light. I lie quivering flung over you.

Doesn't it make you melancholy—looking at the stars?

Such she often felt herself--struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: But this is what I see; this is what I see, and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her.

When I heard you cry I followed you, and saw you put down your handkerchief, screwed up, with its rage, with its hate, knotted in it.

This is our world, lit with crescents and stars of light; and great petals half transparent block the openings like purple windows. Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small. The stalks of flowers are thick as oak trees. Leaves are high as the domes of vast cathedrals. We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver.

Some people go to priests; others to poetry...I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken.

Women's rights, that antediluvian topic.

It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue--the penalty of living in an old civilisation with a notebook.

To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?

Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice.

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.

Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have—what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization—let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses—