Virginia Woolf
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
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.
It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
Language is wine upon the lips.
Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.
There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.Collection: Self
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.Collection: Inspirational
But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.Collection: Happiness
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.Collection: Desire
A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her lifeCollection: Feminist
Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of youCollection: Love
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.Collection: Growing Up
I am rooted, but I flow.Collection: Inspirational Life
One must learn to be silent just as one must learn to talk.Collection: Silence
Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotchpotch of impulses, our perpetual miracle - for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death; let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.Collection: Caring
I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.Collection: People
Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.Collection: Interesting
I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.Collection: Love