Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Life's bare as a bone.

In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.

Use words that soak up life.

Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.

She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.

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.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.

Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.

O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.

The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published.

The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.

Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame

If you drink the good wine of the noble countess, you have to entertain her less desirable friends.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever

Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.

If this were the time or the place to uphold a paradox, I am half inclined to state that Norfolk is one of the most beautiful of counties.

But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality has no such simple effect upon the mind of man.

I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.

Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.

Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.

A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.