Virginia Woolf quote: "Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."

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

Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.

Virginia Woolf

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