Quotes from Virginia Woolf

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of-man.

madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground, "you're hurt!" "I'm dead, sir!" she replied. A few minutes later, they became engaged.

Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death.

Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.

I do think all good and evil comes from words. I have to tune myself into a good temper with something musical, and I run to a book as a child to its mother.

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.

Does Nature supplement what man advanced? Or does she complete what he began?

But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them.

Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours.

To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...

The art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea.

You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?

King old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always to to a good man, they say.

There are no teachers, saints, prophets, good people, but the artists.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.

Safe! safe! safe!' the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry 'Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.

The root of things, what they were all afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty.

To be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.

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.