The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated
faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the
features from faces. People might walk through me. And what is
this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found
myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar - forest trees or
the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel;
our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth
naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these
pavements are shells, bones and silence.


Virginia Woolf

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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...
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Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends c...
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I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It exp...
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Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and t...
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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...
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It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
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If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not abo...
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Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
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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...
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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.
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It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and...
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My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery --always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring...
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It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if...
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If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure -- the relationship so secret and private compa...
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Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
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All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority an...
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Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distort...
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Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned...
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The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the poli...
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That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
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The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
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When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.
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The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.
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Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
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To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
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No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
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As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.
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When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
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If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
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Books are the mirrors of the soul.
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To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
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Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the...
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Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever ...
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Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you.
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One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
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Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
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I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.
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Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be subst...
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Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... ...
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When a subject is highly controversial... one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how o...
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I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locke...
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Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and s...
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As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk...
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Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of cre...
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Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can on...
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For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in com...
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Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped...
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Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
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A strange thing has happened -- while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has be...
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There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them ...
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Humor is the first gift to perish in a foreign language.
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What is meant by reality? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be...
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One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats --and one always secret...
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Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
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Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
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A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
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Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
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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