Quotes from Virginia Woolf

As for himself, when he went to go to a party, as one was sometimes obliged to, from a wish not to give offence, he walked into the middle of the room, said 'Ha! Ha!' as loud as ever he could, considered he had done his duty, and went home.

It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories. It is far pleasanter than writing reviews of famous novels.

egotistical. Worst of all, he is a tyrant. But look! she said, looking at him. Look

For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on the top of St Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet

One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words

That was the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going, or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing; but one thing led to another and by degrees something had formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this calm, this certainty, and it was this process that people called living.

And are you in love? And are you happy? And do you sometimes write a poem? And have you had your hair cut? And have you met anybody of such beauty your eyes dance, as the waves danced

I almost envied him the possession of this modest and clear flame.

There is perhaps a kinship among qualities; one draws another along with it; and the biographer should here call attention to the fact that this clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude. Having stumbled over a chest, Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.

Society gives me chicken and coffee, bed and lodging, in return for a certain number of pieces of paper which were left me by an aunt, for no other reason than that I share her name.

All night men and women seethed up and down the well-known beats.

Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.

Desejei dilatar a noite para a encher de sonhos.

Ahora me entregaré. Ahora me soltaré. Ahora por fin liberaré el retenido, el violentamente rechazado deseo de ser consumida. Juntos galoparemos por desiertas colinas, en las que la golondrina hunde las puntas de las alas en oscuras lagunas y las columnas erectas se conservan enteras. A la ola que se estrella en la playa, a la ola que lanza su blanca espuma hasta los más lejanos confines de la tierra, arrojo mis violetas, mi ofrenda a Percival

Do you have any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.

A daddy-long-legs shot from corner to corner and hit the lamp globe. The wind blew straight dashes of rain across the window, which flashed silver as they passed through the light. A single leaf tapped hurriedly, persistently, upon the glass. There was a hurricane out at sea.

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

That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.

Cierra con llave tus bibliotecas, si quieres, pero no hay barrera, cerradura, ni cerrojo que puedas imponer a la libertad de mi mente.

You can't drive a bayonet through a chap's body in cold blood, he remembered him saying. And you can't go in for an exam. without drinking, said Edward.

I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

How explain to him that she, who had been lapped like a lily in folds of paduasoy, had hacked heads off, and lain with loose women among treasure sacks in the holds of pirate ships?...

Mr. Oscar Browning was a great figure in Cambridge at one time, and used to examine the students at Girton and Newnham. Mr. Oscar Browning was wont to declare "that the impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers, was that, irrespective of the marks he might give, the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man.