Quotes from Virginia Woolf

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

But when we sit together, close,' said Bernard, 'we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.

Love had a thousand shapes.

And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is a woman's whole existence.

But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.

Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it.

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.

letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps - who knows? - we might talk by the way.

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought.

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.

Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.

Sir, I would trust you with my heart. Moreover, we have left our bodies in the banqueting hall. Those on the turf are the shadows of our souls.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

One must love everything.

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

But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.