Virginia Woolf
The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.Collection: Dark
I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?Collection: Life
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.Collection: Freedom
A light here required a shadow there.Collection: Light
I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.Collection: People
Intimacy is a difficult art.Collection: Art
I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin.Collection: Shadow
For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping.Collection: Sports
At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.Collection: Time
If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man; some think even greater.Collection: Beautiful
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized.Collection: Stress
Jealousy ... survives every other passion of mankind.Collection: Jealousy
London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... To walk alone through London is the greatest rest.Collection: Moving
Twice Flush had done his utmost to kill his enemy; twice he had failed. And why had he failed, he asked himself? Because he loved Miss Barrett. Looking up at her from under his eyebrows as she lay, severe and silent on the sofa, he knew that he must love her for ever. Things are not simple but complex. If he bit Mr. Browning he bit her too. Hatred is not hatred; hatred is also love.Collection: Simple
Lord, how tired one gets of one's own writing.Collection: Writing
Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.Collection: Silly
My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.Collection: Children
I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases.Collection: Mother
I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement.Collection: Mind
Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.Collection: Lying
Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations.Collection: Character
Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.Collection: Thinking
It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.Collection: Determination
...she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstacy in the air. Where to begin?--that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made.Collection: Running
Only longing can fill with more of itself.Collection: Chaos
A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.Collection: Running
She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable --- this interminable life.Collection: Past
He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.Collection: Dream
The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.Collection: Dark
But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.Collection: Writing
Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.Collection: Fiction
war is a man's game ... the killing machine has a gender and it is male.Collection: War
War is not women's history.Collection: Inspiring
I want some one to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarreling and reconciliation I need privacy--to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.Collection: Cat
Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.Collection: Poetry
No, I'm not clever. I've always cared more for people than for ideas.Collection: Clever
Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.Collection: Wise
I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.Collection: Men
We read Charlotte Bronte not for exquisite observation of character - her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy - hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life - hers is that of a country parson's daughter; but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt.Collection: War
I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.Collection: Writing
Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.Collection: Running
The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.Collection: Mind
I have sometimes dreamt ... that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards -- their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble -- the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Reality
So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.Collection: Journey
Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.Collection: Song
They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.Collection: Children
When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.Collection: Writing