Quotes from Virginia Woolf

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

The immense success of our life is, I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it.

Still, life had a way of adding day to day

Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.

Life without illusion is a ghostly affair.

what she loved: life, London, this moment of june.

Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.

There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death.

Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.

Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day

If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

Language is wine upon the lips.

The first duty of a lecturer: to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks, and keep on the mantelpiece forever.

It's my choice, to choose how to live my life.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices

These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely.

So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living.

You can't think how I depend on you, and when you're not there the colour goes out of my life.

A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.