Quotes from Virginia Woolf

We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.

Oh and I thought, as i was dressing, how interesting it would be to describe the approach of age, and the gradual coming of death. As people describe love. To note every symptom of failure: but why failure? To treat age as an experience that is different from the others; and to detect every one of the gradual stages towards death which is a tremendous experience, an not as unconscious, at least in its approaches, as death is.

They were both in the prime of youth, or even in that season which precedes the prime of youth, the season before the smooth pink folds of the flower have burst their gummy case, when the wings of the butterfly, though fully grown, are motionless in the sun.

Her eyes seemed to question, to commiserate, to be, for a second, love itself.

Feminism', we have had to destroy.

You have no one who has any sort of consideration for you. You have had patience and endurance till I am sick of the virtues, and what have they done for you? Half-killed you.

And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves.

She put on her lace collar. She put on her new hat and he never noticed; and he was happy without her.

It was the present moment. No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her heart, and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment?

Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation...to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.

Clarissa had a theory in those days - they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people.

Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity!

They were boastful, triumphant; it seemed to both that they had read every book in the world; known every sin, passion, and joy. Civilizations stood round them like flowers ready for picking. Ages lapped at their feet like waves fit for sailing.

standing, as now, lean as a knife

The night and the stars, the dawn coming up, the barges swimming past, the sun setting.... Ah dear, she sighed, well, the sunset is very lovely too. I sometimes think that poetry isn't so much what we write as what we feel, Mr. Denham.

I am she that men call Modesty. Virgin I am and ever shall be. Not for me the fruitful fields and the fertile vineyard. Increase is odious to me; and when the apples burgeon or the flocks breed, I run, I run, I let my mantle fall. My hair covers my eyes, I do not see. Spare, O spare!

One never gets anything worth having by post.

She liked to be alone; she liked to be herself

I have torn off the whole of May and June,' said Susan, 'and twenty days of July. I have torn them off and screwed them up so that they no longer exist, save as a weight in my side. They have been crippled days, like moths with shrivelled wings unable to fly.

Pale, with dark hair, the one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is the romantic. He is here.

I will come,' said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.

The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with skepticism and solitude.

And if it be true that it is one of the tokens of the fully developed mind that it does not think specially or separately of sex, how much harder it is to attain that condition now than ever before. ... No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own ...

I am obsessed at nights with the idea of my own worthlessness, and if it were only to turn a light on to save my life I think I would not do it.