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Virginia Woolf
Quotes by Virginia Woolf
Quotes by Virginia Woolf
“Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”
Virginia Woolf
“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
Virginia Woolf
“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.”
Virginia Woolf
“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
Virginia Woolf
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
Virginia Woolf”
Virginia Woolf
“Language is wine upon the lips.”
Virginia Woolf
“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”
Virginia Woolf
“As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”
Virginia Woolf
“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.”
Virginia Woolf
“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.”
Virginia Woolf
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
Virginia Woolf
“Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
Virginia Woolf
“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”
Virginia Woolf
“We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.”
Virginia Woolf
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
Virginia Woolf
“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”
Virginia Woolf
“The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.”
Virginia Woolf
“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.”
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.”
Virginia Woolf
“Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.”
Virginia Woolf
“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.”
Virginia Woolf
“Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.”
Virginia Woolf
“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”
Virginia Woolf
“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
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?”
Virginia Woolf
“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.”
Virginia Woolf
“Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.”
Virginia Woolf
“Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.”
Virginia Woolf
“The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.”
Virginia Woolf
“If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?”
Virginia Woolf
