Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Each had his own business to think of. Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women.

for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge

I remember one morning... getting up at dawn... there was such a sense of possibility! You know? That feeling? And... and I remember thinking to myself: 'So this is the beginning of happiness...' 'This is where it starts!' 'And, of course, there'll always be more.' Never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning, It was happiness. It was the moment...

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.

For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street.

I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.

To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...

I will not be famous, great. I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.

What does the brain matter compared with the heart?

For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.