How much she wanted it - that people should look pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to have other reasons for doing things. Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand) for no one was ever for a second taken in.
Virginia Woolf
Related Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; ... VIRGINIA WOOLF (Strother) just had that confidence that she thought she was going to knock it in. (Sunday) she had ... BARBARA TURNER But now that she had achieved knighthood, and thought and acted as she wanted and decided, for one h... KATHY ACKER One of the reasons she was voted unanimous all league is because as a setter she was such a pivotal ... SANDY PRICE She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she tho... F. SCOTT FITZGERALD For the first time, she did want more. She did not know what she wanted, knew that it was dangerous ... IAIN PEARS She was a beautiful person. She was always doing things for people. I called her the rescue ranger. ... AUTRAULIA HARRIS She was just one of those people. Things she didn't have to do, she would do. She didn't have to wor... RUBY ALI And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been... KURT VONNEGUT JR. And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been... KURT VONNEGUT She could ask for anything, she thought dizzily, anything--an end to pain or world hunger or disease... CASSANDRA CLARE But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pill... KURT VONNEGUT She had loved him for such a long time, she thought. How was it that she did now know him at all? CASSANDRA CLARE Melissa knew she didn't play real well (in the first half). She took that one shot and it barely tou... DAVE KERSCHBAUMER She hoped that they would someday find a cure for cancer. She never wanted her kids, or anyone, to g... JIM HOUDEK Where was Sam? It hit her full force then, the shocking realization. Was this how Sam felt? Was... MICHAEL GRANT She was not an unkind woman, despite a lifetime of being gently dried out on the stove of education,... TERRY PRATCHETT Not everyone was healed during these services. She would tell those who looked to her for a healing ... MARGO MONG Do people ever climb the demon towers? Like, for any reason?" Aline looked up. "Climb the demo... CASSANDRA CLARE The tears were there, waiting to make their escape. But she wouldn’t let them. Not this time. She ... ELAINE WHITE And when she started becoming a “young lady,” and no one was allowed to look at her because she ... STEPHEN CHBOSKY That was the freshman point guard most people think you get. To struggled so much and look out of so... BONNIE HENRICKSON For a moment she felt utterly dislocated. She did not know where she was; she was not entirely sure ... NEIL GAIMAN She often spoke to falling seeds and said, "Ah hope you fall on soft ground," because she had heard ... ZORA NEALE HURSTON Yet losing him seemed unbearable. He was the one she loved, the one she would always love, and as he... NICHOLAS SPARKS What she did caught on with younger people in town. She loved it and was adamant about what she did.... MIKE HEIL It was so close and she was really disappointed to not get a chance to swim. We call her the 'torped... DANA FOSSMO She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which ... AYN RAND The moment she was cursed, I lost her. Once it wears off- soon- she will be embarrassed to remember ... HOLLY BLACK She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish t... ARUNDHATI ROY She didn't belong anywhere and she never really belonged to anyone. And everyone else belonged somew... C. JOYBELL C. When she came to her senses again she cut off all contact with him. It had not been easy, but she ha... STIEG LARSSON Those who killed Rosemary Nelson did so because they thought it would destroy the Good Friday agreem... MO MOWLAM It hardly mattered. She was tired of waiting for him to acknowledge who he was. Tired of donning a f... ELIZABETH HOYT She tried to educate herself about issues that would make life better for other people in society th... CAROL CARTER What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing... ALICE MUNRO She completely devoured it within a second. ... If she would have been ill for any other medical rea... KATHRYN TUCKER [Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. Sh... ANNE CARSON She liked to imagine that when she passed, the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymo... ALICE SEBOLD Then she did something so unexpected Nico would later think he dreamed it. She walked up to Nico, wh... RICK RIORDAN Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not... KURT VONNEGUT For most of her life she just expected things would work out, that people would be kind. Now she rec... STEWART O'NAN First time she's ever played varsity and she stepped up and did a nice job. I was hoping she would c... DENNIS MELCHER Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been... KURT VONNEGUT It appeared to Harriet that she was always the one who remembered having seen other people. They nev... ELIZABETH TAYLOR No one would have ever known (that she was ill) because of her drive. She was in a lot of pain, and ... JACQUIE SMALL She wondered whether there would ever come an hour in her life when she didn't think of him -- didn'... PHILIP PULLMAN There was no real need for her to tell them that yet again, but that was all right with her. She was... DAVID WEBER She did not date. She did not have time for men. Men were never, ever worth a great amount of energy... MANDY NACHAMPASSACK-MALONEY Sissy had two great failings. She was a great lover and a great mother. She had so much of tendernes... BETTY SMITH She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. ZELDA FITZGERALD My mother encouraged it so much. She was so supportive. Even if as a kid, I would do the dumbest tri... DAVID BLAINE I was very excited for Melissa Fuller. She's been working really hard. I haven't put her in the 100 ... JULIE WILLIS She knew. She knew how quickly things could break. You did the things you could. You tended to the w... PATRICK ROTHFUSS It was encouraging to see that she sometimes got things wrong. Tyler's persistence had nothing to do... STEPHENIE MEYER It wasn't that Lorrie Ann was becoming a Goody Two-shoes. It wasn't that she wanted to be perfect or... RUFI THORPE ...she was honest enough to admit she married him because actions other men would not conceive of to... ELLEN O'CONNELL She knew gay people long before me. She was well-grounded, well-versed in all people's rights. It's ... LYNN COTHREN She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing... IAN MCEWAN Transit to anywhere made her feel insecure, and because she was not verbal, she would have tantrums.... CINDY POTTER But Julian's blood was different. When she saw it she thought of him, shot and crumpling, the way hi... CASSANDRA CLARE In Charn [Jadis] had taken no notice of Polly (till the very end) because Digory was the one she wan... C.S. LEWIS She could not picture it. Herself riding on the subway or streetcar, caring for new horses, talking ... ALICE MUNRO She’d been feeling pleased with a couple of moves, had thought she was gaining the upper hand. But... EMILY ARDEN She didn’t have a good reason for most of what she did. Mostly, she went by what seemed right in t... JOSEPH FINK Did she make you laugh? Did she love you as much as you loved her? Did she protect you and warm you ... JUDITH KRANTZ Anna had been preparing herself for this meeting, had thought what she would say to him, but she did... LEO TOLSTOY There was an undeniable force that seemed to emanate from Andy and make good things happen for many,... JEFFREY SOLOMON I knew this was a perfect place for Elisa to go. She (Leap of Faith) is a very complex horse, and sh... CAROL DOVER In the teahouses one could hear the most absurd stories, such as how a in a certain place a huge spi... LAO SHE During my childhood I didn't need to hear stories about evil ogres eating children and so forth; the... LAO SHE She told me, 'It's just sex,' ... She flew to London to let me know how interested she was in the pa... FERNANDO MEIRELLES She told me, 'It's just sex,' ... She flew to London to let me know how interested she was in the p... FERNANDO MEIRELLES Jo's face was a study next day, for the secret rather weighed upon her, and she found it hard not to... LOUISA MAY ALCOTT Vexis stopped crying. She now looked more annoyed than anything. She feigned like she was trying to ... C.M. HAYDEN Annie, who up until this very day had always felt like a child--which is why she could not marry, sh... ELIZABETH STROUT She thought how strange it would be if she ever said 'Hello' to him. One did not greet oneself each ... AYN RAND She did not know where she was; she was not entirely sure who she was. It is astonishing just how mu... NEIL GAIMAN She did what she thought in her own professional judgment was best. She might not have been right, b... JOEL HIRSCHHORN She did some nice things for us. She really only came out because she loved being around the team. JACE HYMAS It was hard to feel the remotest sympathy for any of the different fools she'd been. As opposed to t... BARBARA KINGSOLVER And for about the millionth time in her life she felt an overwhelming gratitude for her best friend.... ROB THOMAS She did a lot of wonderful things for me. She really decided I should go to art school, which I did ... DORIS TURNBAUGH She was a champion of the underdog and took on a number of causes. She was interested in people who ... ED RICHARDSON None of our people ever felt that she was a danger to her children. If we thought that for a minute,... DENISE MONTEIRO All Michelle wanted was to see for herself if she could do it or not. And when it became evident tha... BARRY AXELROD Inside the music like this, she understood many things. She understood that Simon was a disappointed... ELIZABETH STROUT At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailo... GUSTAVE FLAUBERT It was a tough one, ... She really took her chances and I thought she played great tennis. I also th... AMELIE MAURESMO She nodded... and was about to turn away. Then, as if she thought better of it, she reached out and ... MELISSA DE LA CRUZ There had been a problem in Bean's house. The problem was staples. Bean loved staples. She loved the... ANNIE BARROWS She was so far absorbed in this work, for it was really difficult to find how all these sounds shoul... NICOLE ARLYN Ashlei was free to spout off how much she loved her savior because Jesus was not about to rear back ... THOMM QUACKENBUSH Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that lonelines... DORIS LESSING A nod at Beatrice who held absolutely still. "She said she would come with me. She insisted on it. S... METTE IVIE HARRISON She may have been drunk, but she wanted the sex and that is legal. She needs to take responsibility ... JOSEPH AMENDOLA I knew my own mother had been in the theater for a while and had taught children, because she used t... EVE ARDEN But now she could not bear the way she sounded. She was not a person anyone could love. .... PETER CAREY I don't think I could ever see her closely," the sentinel replied, "however close she came." His own... PETER S. BEAGLE She came back to a place where she knew people would care about her and she'd have an opportunity to... EARL WOUDSTRA
More Virginia Woolf
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. VIRGINIA WOOLF Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in c... VIRGINIA WOOLF One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as w... VIRGINIA WOOLF Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends c... VIRGINIA WOOLF I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It exp... VIRGINIA WOOLF Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and t... VIRGINIA WOOLF Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art. VIRGINIA WOOLF Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded. VIRGINIA WOOLF It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. VIRGINIA WOOLF Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is writ... VIRGINIA WOOLF As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. VIRGINIA WOOLF It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or... VIRGINIA WOOLF The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but ... VIRGINIA WOOLF So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by l... VIRGINIA WOOLF For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It h... VIRGINIA WOOLF Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all ... VIRGINIA WOOLF All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point VIRGINIA WOOLF Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of ro... VIRGINIA WOOLF Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written ... VIRGINIA WOOLF I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again -- as I always am when I... VIRGINIA WOOLF We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. VIRGINIA WOOLF Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! VIRGINIA WOOLF It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entir... VIRGINIA WOOLF The older one grows, the more one likes indecency. VIRGINIA WOOLF Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever t... VIRGINIA WOOLF At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials. VIRGINIA WOOLF These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect t... VIRGINIA WOOLF It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. VIRGINIA WOOLF If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not abo... VIRGINIA WOOLF Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others. VIRGINIA WOOLF My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring... VIRGINIA WOOLF We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by fi... VIRGINIA WOOLF I feel certain that I'm going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times.... VIRGINIA WOOLF As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. VIRGINIA WOOLF What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once. VIRGINIA WOOLF It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and... VIRGINIA WOOLF My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery --always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring... VIRGINIA WOOLF It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if... VIRGINIA WOOLF If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure -- the relationship so secret and private compa... VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of... VIRGINIA WOOLF Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women? VIRGINIA WOOLF All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority an... VIRGINIA WOOLF Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to t... VIRGINIA WOOLF But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in,... VIRGINIA WOOLF It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handlin... VIRGINIA WOOLF Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art. VIRGINIA WOOLF Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distort... VIRGINIA WOOLF Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned... VIRGINIA WOOLF The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the poli... VIRGINIA WOOLF That great Cathedral space which was childhood. VIRGINIA WOOLF The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping. VIRGINIA WOOLF Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of an... VIRGINIA WOOLF Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or VIRGINIA WOOLF When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred. VIRGINIA WOOLF We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even t... VIRGINIA WOOLF Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human... VIRGINIA WOOLF The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to fol... VIRGINIA WOOLF If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about e... VIRGINIA WOOLF A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in t... VIRGINIA WOOLF One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than whe... VIRGINIA WOOLF The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind. VIRGINIA WOOLF Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic. VIRGINIA WOOLF It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with... VIRGINIA WOOLF To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves. VIRGINIA WOOLF Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doin... VIRGINIA WOOLF No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. VIRGINIA WOOLF As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking. VIRGINIA WOOLF When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing. VIRGINIA WOOLF If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. VIRGINIA WOOLF I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It exp... VIRGINIA WOOLF Books are the mirrors of the soul. VIRGINIA WOOLF I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, re... VIRGINIA WOOLF To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father. VIRGINIA WOOLF Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the... VIRGINIA WOOLF Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever ... VIRGINIA WOOLF Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the... VIRGINIA WOOLF Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. VIRGINIA WOOLF The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. VIRGINIA WOOLF Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills ... VIRGINIA WOOLF Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you. VIRGINIA WOOLF One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of... VIRGINIA WOOLF A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her c... VIRGINIA WOOLF The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as s... VIRGINIA WOOLF But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority th... VIRGINIA WOOLF The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only... VIRGINIA WOOLF Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. VIRGINIA WOOLF There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intell... VIRGINIA WOOLF I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and w... VIRGINIA WOOLF I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure. VIRGINIA WOOLF Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before... VIRGINIA WOOLF Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our c... VIRGINIA WOOLF Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. VIRGINIA WOOLF Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be subst... VIRGINIA WOOLF Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... ... VIRGINIA WOOLF When a subject is highly controversial... one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how o... VIRGINIA WOOLF I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locke... VIRGINIA WOOLF Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every ye... VIRGINIA WOOLF Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and s... VIRGINIA WOOLF As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk... VIRGINIA WOOLF Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of cre... VIRGINIA WOOLF Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can on... VIRGINIA WOOLF For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in com... VIRGINIA WOOLF Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped... VIRGINIA WOOLF Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. VIRGINIA WOOLF A strange thing has happened -- while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has be... VIRGINIA WOOLF There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them ... VIRGINIA WOOLF Humor is the first gift to perish in a foreign language. VIRGINIA WOOLF Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still posse... VIRGINIA WOOLF For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private f... VIRGINIA WOOLF What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accid... VIRGINIA WOOLF Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of E... VIRGINIA WOOLF If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, w... VIRGINIA WOOLF What is meant by reality? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be... VIRGINIA WOOLF One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats --and one always secret... VIRGINIA WOOLF Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. VIRGINIA WOOLF Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even slee... VIRGINIA WOOLF The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only... VIRGINIA WOOLF In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us. VIRGINIA WOOLF Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning. VIRGINIA WOOLF The first duty of a lecturer--to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap u... VIRGINIA WOOLF It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality VIRGINIA WOOLF The first duty of a lecturer is to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap... VIRGINIA WOOLF Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women? VIRGINIA WOOLF The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story o... VIRGINIA WOOLF All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority an... VIRGINIA WOOLF A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. VIRGINIA WOOLF Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation. VIRGINIA WOOLF It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeate... VIRGINIA WOOLF This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to... VIRGINIA WOOLF On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points. VIRGINIA WOOLF When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazing... VIRGINIA WOOLF Language is wine upon the lips. VIRGINIA WOOLF Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry. VIRGINIA WOOLF A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it mu... VIRGINIA WOOLF Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the fi... VIRGINIA WOOLF Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figu... VIRGINIA WOOLF It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by c... VIRGINIA WOOLF One must love everything. VIRGINIA WOOLF How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this... VIRGINIA WOOLF The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish,... VIRGINIA WOOLF You cannot find peace by avoiding life. VIRGINIA WOOLF Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at... VIRGINIA WOOLF These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one... VIRGINIA WOOLF Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparen... VIRGINIA WOOLF Arrange whatever pieces come your way. VIRGINIA WOOLF Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bag... VIRGINIA WOOLF It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly. VIRGINIA WOOLF One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than... VIRGINIA WOOLF He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life. VIRGINIA WOOLF When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman se... VIRGINIA WOOLF It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to think how, wound about in their hea... VIRGINIA WOOLF Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their ... VIRGINIA WOOLF To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want a... VIRGINIA WOOLF For this moment, this one moment, we are together. I press you to me. Come, pain, feed on me. Bury y... VIRGINIA WOOLF For most of history, Anonymous was a woman. VIRGINIA WOOLF The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like ... VIRGINIA WOOLF I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. VIRGINIA WOOLF Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often ... VIRGINIA WOOLF The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty obser... VIRGINIA WOOLF Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all g... VIRGINIA WOOLF I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am roo... VIRGINIA WOOLF It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people ... VIRGINIA WOOLF It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning. VIRGINIA WOOLF One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her p... VIRGINIA WOOLF I rise from my worst disasters, I turn, I change. VIRGINIA WOOLF As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole worl... VIRGINIA WOOLF How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the sol... VIRGINIA WOOLF Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life. VIRGINIA WOOLF What does the brain matter compared with the heart? VIRGINIA WOOLF Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read. VIRGINIA WOOLF Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. VIRGINIA WOOLF If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure -- the relationship so secret and private com... VIRGINIA WOOLF I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street. VIRGINIA WOOLF I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual. VIRGINIA WOOLF Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of... VIRGINIA WOOLF The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness. VIRGINIA WOOLF If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly an... VIRGINIA WOOLF Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart. VIRGINIA WOOLF I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality o... VIRGINIA WOOLF The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. VIRGINIA WOOLF I am rooted, but I flow. VIRGINIA WOOLF When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they? VIRGINIA WOOLF Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. VIRGINIA WOOLF The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge... VIRGINIA WOOLF One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always se... VIRGINIA WOOLF I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it. VIRGINIA WOOLF The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is ... VIRGINIA WOOLF If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy... VIRGINIA WOOLF With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets—what nonsense was he ... VIRGINIA WOOLF Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck betwee... VIRGINIA WOOLF Yes, I deserve a spring–I owe nobody nothing. VIRGINIA WOOLF One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtl... VIRGINIA WOOLF What I value is the naked contact of a mind. VIRGINIA WOOLF Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic ac... VIRGINIA WOOLF All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense ... VIRGINIA WOOLF To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last,... VIRGINIA WOOLF