Virginia Woolf Quotes

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Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

By Virginia Woolf
Arnold Bennett says that the horror of marriage lies in its 'dailiness.' All acuteness of relationship is rubbed away by this. The truth is mo...

By Virginia Woolf
The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.

By Virginia Woolf
We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to someone opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on

By Virginia Woolf
Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and the most common actions

By Virginia Woolf
What is meant by reality? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying

By Virginia Woolf
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats --and one always secretes too much jelly.

By Virginia Woolf
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?

By Virginia Woolf
Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.

By 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 women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.

By Virginia Woolf
But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.

By Virginia Woolf
If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? -- not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

By Virginia Woolf
As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers

By Virginia Woolf
Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.

By Virginia Woolf
Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.

By Virginia Woolf
You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.

By Virginia Woolf
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

By Virginia Woolf
You can not gain peace by avoiding life.

By Virginia Woolf
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

By Virginia Woolf
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

By Virginia Woolf
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.

By Virginia Woolf
Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

By Virginia Woolf
Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

By Virginia Woolf
We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.

By Virginia Woolf
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

By Virginia Woolf
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

By Virginia Woolf
Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

By Virginia Woolf
This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

By Virginia Woolf
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

By Virginia Woolf
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.

By Virginia Woolf