Quotes from Virginia Woolf

On or about December, 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.

It is the masculine values that prevail… 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.

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.

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

Death is the enemy…. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death.

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.

In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what is above.

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

The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.

As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun.

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book shown to him by heart, and his friends can only read the title.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

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 would mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.

Trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

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